This book was a boring waste of time. I'm glad it was short. I got the recommendation off of NPR and I can't help but feel that the idea that NPR is pretentious is sometimes well deserved, because this fits the bill. The characters and the story are boring, and nothing really happens. It was all ridiculously obscure and long words for no reason other than being "artsy" or "literary". The author should have spent more time thinking up a plot and less browsing his thesaurus.