A Little More Human

I struggled with this one.

It's immaculately written, in the sense that most sentences and paragraphs were just delightful to read, clever and interesting and, uh, well-written whatever that means, and perhaps good writing was an extra welcome quality to me after reading that Stuart Woods dreck. But! As far as the story here goes, the characters in this novel, the actual cover-to-cover plotting and piece moving and development and denouement - I'm left wanting more, I think. So many narrative dead ends here, so little pay off, and I'm sure so much of that is intentional and that plenty else is just flying over my head. It's not like this is rare, a case where I've enjoyed reading a book but couldn't reliably recount the big plot points or what about the book mattered, and some of my favorite authors have given me similar experiences through the years. (Heller, Vonnegut, Murakami, to name a few.)

But then, in a certain sense, it makes sense for the narrative here to be a jumbled mess - the book deals primarily with the frailty of the human brain - missing memories, dementia, that horrible gap between thinking or knowing something and being able to clearly express it. So for the story to be full of dead ends and red herrings kind of works, I guess. Maybe. Kind of.