I guess when I read the follow up to this book and thought, oh it’s called a trilogy but it’s NOT REALLY a trilogy, I might have been wrong? I was reading this one and the plot partially involves a 50 year old man who works for the the IRS believing that his wife, with whom he kind of does and doesn’t have an open relationship with, is cheating on him, or if they do kind of have an open relationship, then sleeping with someone else, which is causing him distress. Anyway, this leads him to volunteer to travel to Belize to try to convince her tech bro (well, whether he’s a tech bro or merely one of the archetype tech bro) to return to the US or maybe just find out if he’s dead or not. Anyway, I thought, why does this sound so familiar and then I realized that all of this happens in the pre-text of her novel Magnificence, which of course how sequels work, in sequence.
So anyway, this book has the same ethereal warming glow of brilliant narration accompanying terrifying dissonance in reality. The language is also so wonderful and the thoughts so driving, and the plot and action so so awful. I guess in my mind, as I narrate a much more cheery (delusional) outlook on most of life, that I might as well get some of that in my reading. It doesn’t make the world much better for me, but it does make it less alien.
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