As yet unpublished

Dysfunctional Memoirs

We've been hearing a lot about A Million Little Pieces lately which has caused a lot of lively debate and discussion with customers in both the bookstore and the coffee shop.  Which is great!  How great to have the general populace debating a book! 

James Frey's A Million Little Pieces (Anchor; $14.95) is a harrowing tale of Frey's journey from a hopeless addict to a sober person.  There is a lot in the book that gives the reader something real to reflect on and really think about.  The story is compelling; chilling; scary; worrisome; arresting and then some.  While there is a lot swirling around about the accuracy of some of the details -- the story is still a true one.  It is -- first and foremost -- James Frey's reality.  And the controversy around it is a good example of how things look through different colored lenses and how one person's reality may be another person's fairy tale.  You just never know when you tell your story if your memory is a little or a lot distorted.  Keep in mind that eye-witnesses are the least reliable part of a court case.

That said, there are other books out today that tell equally dysfunctional stories without quite the same level of distortion or controversy.  J R Moehringer's The Tender Bar is the story of J. R.'s life growing up in Manhasset, Long Island and being essentially raised by the regulars at Publicans, the legendary and local, watering hole.  J. R. never knew his DJ father but spends a lifetime waiting to hear his fleeting broadcasts; his mother is loving and caring but hopeless and dreamy and his uncles and grandparents are a family ... but just.  That J. R. makes it through grade school, let alone high school and then Yale and Harvard is nothing short of a miracle.  J. R. is a lyrical writer; a fantastic storyteller and his life -- though sad, pathetic and dysfunctional -- is an inspiration.  How much of this is fabricated?  Is seen through the gauze of collective and recalled memory?  Hard to say -- but it rings more than true-enough and should satisfy the soul.

A very favorite dysfunctional family memoir of mine at the moment is Jeannette Wall's The Glass Castle.  I'd like to think that some of what she writes is mis-remembered or inaccurately recalled or ... tainted by the viewpoint of a child ... but sadly I think her memoir is super-strengh, 100%, over-the-top bonafide.  And that is what makes her memoir so searing and endearing and heartbreaking to read.  The Walls are an intelligent but quirky family; or that's how the story starts.  But the bigger they grow, the older they get the more terrifying and surreal their world becomes.  After moving all around the United States the Walls' land in the very depths of the hauntingly beautiful but terribly poor and abused hollers of West Virginia and this is where Jeannette's world starts to unravel and collapse.  Through sheer determination, the Walls' kids survival instincts kick into high gear and pull them out of their almost acid trip like existence and deliver them into a much more normal and mainstream life.  The very best part of The Glass Castle is the sheer honesty and love and respect shown by Jeannette for her parents and her siblings.

The James Frey fray

So, now that Oprah has moved on to Elie Wiesel's Night, maybe the James Frey shitstorm will end.  I'm not really sure what the whole hullabaloo is about.  The undisputed fact about James Frey is that he was -- some would argue is still -- an addict.  His addictions were to drugs and alcohol and he was hopelessly in love with both of them.  Given the choice between a buzz in a gutter and a sober day in a castle, he'd choose the buzz in the gutter each and every time.  Now, many, many, many adults in this world have had a night on the town that they either remember as a haze or remember with some holes or alarmingly don't remember at all.  And those same adults have pieced together their "good time" with the help of their then cohorts or witnesses and as a result end up with a "recovered memory" of their "good time."  Some percentage of these adults will also probably admit that their memory of a "good time" is sometimes inflated, embellished and just totally wrong.  Yet, it will become their memory and get woven into the fabric of their past and become a story that gets told from time-to-time and also one that grows with age.

While some of James Frey's missteps are pretty egregious -- police records totally mismatched with his memory and then some -- I still firmly believe that they are his memory.  I believe that much of his fabrications are collective memories, splintered memories and probably recovered memories.  While he may know -- and is sort of admitting to -- that they are not correct they do truly define the way he looks at and views himself and his past.

So, perhaps as Oprah considers this a tale of redemption -- one could also look at it as a further example of the destructive impact of addiction.  That a person who has so damaged their self physically and emotionally that they think of themselves in such a harsh, unkind, unforgiving and horrible way.  That Frey wants people to know him as a harsh criminal when in fact he is just a hopelessly addictive person.  That the disease would allow him to present himself so unkindly to the world and believe that this is his true person when others around him see that it is not.

Was it not frustrating to read about his time as an inpatient and his constant refusal of help?  His constant refusal to join the program and work through his addictive behaviors so that later he would be free of them?  Isn't that part of the value of the book?  And doesn't Frey -- in his embellishments and beliefs that he is a far worse person than he truly is -- magnify the real value of this book?  Isn't the message, perhaps, that you should not follow Frey's footsteps? 

Maybe there shouldn't be a Foreward to the new editions -- but an Afterward.  An analysis by Frey on what he's learned -- if he's learned -- from believe his very own bad and faulty thinking?

Okay -- so what is my point?  I don't think that Frey considers this anything but a memoir.  In fact, I think it's interesting that what is largely non-fiction was presented as fiction.  Think about it -- considering your life fiction because it seems so unreal to you?  A Million Little Pieces is a memoir -- it is James Frey's memory of his life to date as he recalls and remembers it regardless of what that looks like in the face of the reality of the world around and outside of his.  I don't know many people that have read this book who would want to live a minute of Frey's past life -- contrived or not.

Until I Find You

John Irving was soundly trounced by pretty much every reviewer of his latest work, Until I Find You.  I love John Irving -- I tend not to be a serial author reader so it's rare for me to wait for a new release by a particular author.  I so loved the Garp books that even though I read them when I was 12 or so, I can still clearly remember them.  Irving made an impact on me.

My brother, his wife and his friend Sarah collect tattoos.  Mark and Laura had a lot of mutual tattoos -- stuff that bound them tighter and represented som solidarity against the cancer that consumed Laura.  Sarah is almost fully tattooed -- almost from neck to ankle.  So, I was pretty curious about Irving's latest because the subject is one I have been confronted with and given some consideration.

Irving takes the reader on a pretty fascinating tour of tattoo parlors in the first 1/3 of Until I Find You.  There's a lot of weird information, lore and mystery imparted.  I think quite fairly.  The rest of Until I Find You is like an uber-redux of Garp and friends.  Sex.  More sex.  Weird sexual hangups.  Lesbians.  Authors with problems.  Boys with identity issues.  Sex.  More sex.  Weird sexual hangups.  New Hampshire.  Wrestling.  Private schools.  Betrayal.  Boys with identity issues.  Sex.  More sex.  Betrayal.  The need to be loved.  Inability to form true relatiionships.  Sex.

You get the idea? 

I think Irving is a very good writer.  I am really liking Until I Find You.  I may be one of a handful.  I will say that the uberGarp bits are way over the top and you really get the idea that Irving really does have issues with sex, betrayal, identity, sense of self, boys, sisters, mothers, men and I'm not so sure that he's got it all worked out yet.  There's more to come and maybe next time it will be so over-the-top that it will be done and we'll all be able to move on to something less redundant.

Irving's writing is too good to lose on more redux. 

If you like Garp ... you'll like Until I Find You.  If you couldn't get through Hotel New Hampshire -- don't even try.  This is no Owen Meany ... no Widow for a Year ... so don't go there. 

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth's next book, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin; $26) is bound to make waves when it releases in early October. Roth imagines a world that has Charles A. Lindbergh defeating FDR in the 1940 presidential election through the eyes of a fictionalized Roth family (and, yes, Philip is a main character). Lindbergh wins on an isolationist platform and an openly anti-Semitic administration.

I'm not done yet, but this is going to be one of the books to read this fall. Much of the novel is derived from real historic facts and incorporates pieces of speeches given by Lindbergh and true events.

The Plot Against America is pretty chilling -- the parallel world created is alarming to look at when you consider where we are, politically, today.

Skinny Dip and then some

I’ve been reading up a blue streak this past week and liking what I’m seeing! I’m still in beach read mode, that, to me, largely means reading mysteries. The night before Carl Hiassen’s Skinny Dip (Knopf, $24.95) went on sale, I pilfered a copy and rushed home to read. There was a little bit of a dilemma once I arrived home in that it was dinnertime and my family was pretty sure that while reading is a noble cause, that dinner and checking in with at least the kids was the right higher priority. Once the troops were fed, I settled in for a night of reading and what a night it was.

I am a huge fan of Carl Hiassen. He’s smart, makes me laugh out loud a few times in the course of a novel and is impossible to read without a constant grin. Skinny Dip is perhaps his best effort to date. I almost blushed as I all but recognized the cruise ship that my family vacationed on this April in the opening pages of this page turner as Charles “Chaz” Perrone dumps his very lovely, model perfect (and wonderfully wealthy) wife Joey over the side in an effort to end her life and their marriage on their 2nd wedding anniversary. No big surprise to any Hiassen fan, Joey doesn’t die and returns to wreak havoc in the decidedly environmentally hostile world that Chaz has created for himself. I promise that you’ll laugh all the way to the beach and back and leave you wanting more.

Greenwich author M.J. Rose’s The Halo Effect (Mira, $12.95) is the merger of a Kay Scarpetta novel and Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs (St. Martin's Press, $7.99). Rose tends to write erotically charged novels but The Halo Effect is a new twist for her. This is the first of The Butterfield Institute series and I’m waiting on tenterhooks for the next installment. The Butterfield Institute is a Manhattan sex therapy clinic and the central character of this series is the very smart expert therapist, Dr. Morgan Snow.

The Halo Effect is a smart novel. One of Dr. Snow’s patients, a high-end call girl (who has some resemblance to the Mayflower Madam), is missing at the same time as a serial killer is at work killing prostitutes in what appears to be a religiously ritualistic manner. I found myself reflecting back on the therapy sessions and grappling with some of the larger issues that are raised through Dr. Snow aka Morgan throughout the course of the novel. This is smart, crisp writing that has you engaged from the first page and will keep you reading until you reach the end.

If you’re looking for something with a slower pace and a little less action, Benjamin Cheever’s The Good Nanny (Bloomsbury, $23.95) is a perfect pick. Readers beware, you’ll get a heavy dose of self examination in the course of this read and for many, The Good Nanny will strike close to home in the same way that Tom Perotta’s Little Children (St. Martin’s Press, $24.95) did. Cheever is an incredibly gifted writer and takes the familiar scene of city folk turned country (albeit in a Fairfield County/Westchester County type of way) and turns it just a twist. Stuart Cross and Andie Wilde hire the perfect nanny – Sugar to the kids – and within a very short time period has the family turned topsy-turvy.

Cheever takes the issues of wealth, job security, social status, racism and ultimately blatant elitism and skewers them with this dry, witty and ultimately in-your-face satire of modern life of a certain group of the haves.

Dancing with Einstein

Kate Wenner's Dancing With Einstein (Scribner, $24) is a gem of a novel. Jonas, a scientist involved with the Manhattan Project, named his daughter Marea for the lunar seas. Marea has just returned from a seven-year journey around the world and is finding it difficult to settle back into the "real world." With the help of four therapists, Marea is trying to find out what made her run for all those years, and why exactly she has never really been at ease with her father's accidental death. As she struggles to find herself, Marea flashes back to her childhood in Princeton, NJ where her father had worked at the Institute for Advanced Studies with such personalities as Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Despite arguments over the ethics of the Atomic bomb, Einstein was very close with the family, and Marea thought of him like a grandfather. Her fond memories of dancing with Grandpa Einstein and exploring with her father in the fifties are intertwined with her current struggle to find herself.

Wenner takes you on a heartbreaking, empathic and humorous ride through Marea's life that is ultimately full of very familiar scenery.

Crescent

You can smell the spices in the food, hear the sultry twang of the Middle Eastern music and feel the intensity of the coffee in this thoughtful, alluring and incredibly timely story. Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (W.W. Norton, $13.95) is a love story, cleverly told. Sirine is a chef at a Lebanese restaurant in Los Angeles - the center of the Middle Eastern community and second home to the staff of the Middle Eastern department from the local university. A beautiful blond haired, green-eyed half-Iraqi, half-American woman, Sirine finds herself discovering love on many levels. Falling in love with the Iraqi professor Hanif (Han), loving the stories that her uncle tells, falling in love with the culture of her father, uncle, lover and the world of the Middle East.

Jaber weaves Sirine's life story and subsequent love story in with just one of many stories that her uncle tells her to clarify life issues. Through weaving the two stories, Jaber is almost using a literary form of alliteration to demonstrate the difference between American and Middle Eastern cultures. The Middle Eastern culture relying on rich symbolism in its most traditional literature and Jaber uses the uncle's tale to bring the same sense of symbolism and mysticism to the very real story of Sirine and Han's blossoming love. Jaber also uses Sirine's skills as a chef to bring the culture of the Middle East to the reader through sumptuously detailed descriptions of the food that Sirine serves to her café customers, her uncle, extended family and lover.

Through the use of food and literature - both ways to bridge cultures - Jaber is also able to bring us a powerful view into a political world. Han is an Iraqi who feels he cannot return to his country. He longs to return to the country he so loves and be, once again, in the midst of a loving family. Having left just as Hussein comes to power, and knowing that his sister died a political prisoner, he knows that it is simply suicidal to return. Through the professors at the school, the café regulars and Sirine's extended yet adoptive family, Jaber demonstrates the melting pot of the Middle East while at the same time shaping, through the similarities of the different countries, a view of the Middle East as a culture. She brings us the pain, the doubt, the longing for a world as remembered before the various conflicts between Iran, Iraq, the United States and various countries and Palestine and Israel.

Jaber is masterful. Crescent is sultry, smelling of cinnamon and cardamom and jasmine and laden with the feel of another culture and the life of exile. At the end, the reader feels like perhaps they took a detour and visited the Middle East while sipping a strong, dark coffee and enjoying a triangle of baklava.

Crescent is a perfect fit with Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead, $14) with Tamim Ansary's West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (Picador; $13) and Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia (Plume; $15) for anyone who wants to not only read great books but get a sense of the culture of the middle east.

Project X

Jim Shepard's voice is just stunning in this punch-you-in-the-stomach novel about growing up. Edwin Hanratty and his best (and only) friend Flake, just can't win. It's crystal clear from page one that neither of these 8th grade boys are dumb and are, in fact, quite smart. It's also clear that they are well loved and cared for by the adults in their respective lives -- and it's just maddening and frustrating to watch them go far far astray as they numbly try to find a foothold in their young lives.

Project X (Knopf, $20) is what I have termed "a Columbine story" and, as a result, way too many people act as though the cover is acid coated. I've experienced this with other books, in particular another favorite of mine, Twelve (Grove, $12) by then 18-year old Nick McDonell. A mother of a teen comes in looking for a good book for a book discussion, we review a group of books and I typically throw in some edgy books to see what will happen. It's rare that I've been able to get a mom to pick up a book like either of these and decide to talk about the issues of growing up in today's world. Regardless, Shepard doesn't let you get away. As a reader, you just want to reach into the pages and through the type and hug Edwin and Flake and tell them that it really will be okay -- those kids that torture them really will stop some day and the teachers and adminstrators are, in their very clumsy ways, trying to care and help.

I think Jim Shepard should be put on a book tour to every middle school PTA group in this country. His ability to "talk" like a 12 year old while unfolding a story of the dangerous mix of disaffected youth and the availability of guns and sheer boredom and unmitigated angst just takes your breath away. Up until the very end, I just didn't believe they would "do it" -- that two boys from nice, comfortable homes with parents who check in on them, have dinner and breakfast with them and go to school conferences for them would pick up guns as a means of ultimate expression.

Shepard is a gifted writer. His use of dialogue is unique and fresh and spot on. And, I have to give him many thanks as Project X has given me a platform to talk with my very own soon-to-be eigth grader about his life and how he feels. It has given me license to dig a little deeper and, knowing that he, too, has read this book, understands why.

http://www.booksite.com/texis/scripts/oop/click_ord/showdetail.html?sid=3167&isbn=140004071X&music=&buyable=0&assoc_id=

Some summer reading thoughts ...

It just doesn’t seem fair to review a book at a time when it’s summertime. Summertime speaks to me of many things, one of them is copious quantities of reading. As a kid, I used to drive my mother nuts because every week I’d go to the library, take out another 10 books, and then read them all. The library was a haven to me and I knew it better than most. Books were the perfect escape on a humid day, when the air didn’t go anywhere and I was all played out from riding my bike in endless loops around the school play yard.

As I grew up, the marrying of reading with summertime didn’t change. While I tend to read pretty much all of the time – and find myself having to explain to major TV personalities why I don’t know them from Adam as a result – in the summertime, my reading changes. While I totally lament the fact that summertime no longer means a lazy hiatus from hard work, I still look forward to the season that speaks of light reading and lots of it.

The summer reading season is off to a roaring start. There’s just a great array of great summer reading – light yet smart. The “beach read” and “chick lit” seems to be at perfection this year with a new crop of writers, along with the seasoned lot, realizing that “beach read” and “chick lit” don’t have to be synonymous with “mental floss.”

I spent this past weekend both reading and listening to The Queen of the South by Arturo-Perez Reverte (Putnam; $25.95). I have always been intrigued by Reverte because The Nautical Chart (Harvest Books; $14) was a book that Warren Cassell (prior store owner) sold like it was some kind of candy. I was fascinated just watching him place the book in a customer’s hands and say “you’ll love it” and then they would return begging for more. So, I settled in to see what this was all about. We were on our way to visit friends in Newport as I started my “reading” via audio tape and I was surprised when my son piped up from the back informing me that my book was “inappropriate” because it “used the f* word too much.” I was, of course, too engrossed in the subject to think of this as a detractor … but, perhaps I should warn that it’s not a family book. Teresa Mendoza is the Queen of the South – the biggest, baddest drug dealer around. She naively entered the world of drugs through a drug runner boyfriend who is, as too often the case, killed on-the-job and is, as a result, forced to run for her life. Few people run for their life in the manner that Theresa. I was dumbstruck by how quickly Teresa was able to rise to power in the heavily hombre dominated world of Spain, Morocco and the unguent world of illicit drug running. Of course, this is a novel no matter how the grit, grime and action make it feel like a biography. Reverte is a masterful storyteller and well translated – the action is real, the suspense it nail biting and the characters vivid.

If you are a fan of John Irving, he may have found his match with newcomer George Hagen’s perfectly pitched first novel, The Laments (Random House; $24.95). Hagen’s cadence and voice are playful and real in this telling of the life story of the Lament family and their ups and downs as they move through life as a family. If you’ve traveled at all as a child – moved schools even once – you’ll identify with the combined pain and thrill of the new and unforeseen world left to be conquered. The Lament family follows the brilliant (but quirky) engineer, Howard Lament, around the world in search of the perfect job. While each job hop is an improvement over the other, his wife Julia feels that settling down may be the better way to root their family. There’s a lot in what happens through perhaps this false rooting of the family. Hagen is expert at laying out the dynamics of change, the push and pull of how a family grows and changes over time told through the exaggerated voice of hyperbole, stereotype and an extra dose of quirk.

In July, Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Doubleday; $22.95) will arrive – a story of a serial killer who only kills serial killers. Not long after I had stayed up way past lights out time reading Lindsay’s more than entertaining work, I picked up Jack Kerley’s The Hundredth Man (Dutton; $23.95). It, too, is a smart serial killer book, though not as cute or maybe light as Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Can you believe I just used cute in conjunction with a book about serial killers? The Hundredth Man opens with the two-man Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team (not so fondly nicknamed Piss-it) being called to the scene of a murder. Their initial investigations has the ear marking of a psychotic killer, yet they are taken off the case. When a second murder happens, it becomes more obvious that a psychotic force is at play and the regular cops have to let the young upstart Piss-it team get involved. Carson Ryder, one of the two team members, is more than meets the eye. His brother – in prison for mass murder – is, much to his utter horror and reluctance, a silent partner that enables him to have near super human powers in crime resolution. Either of these books will send shivers up your spine – Lindsay will let you laugh it off and Kerley will make you look over your shoulder more often than normal. If you like a good thriller, this is where to start.

The Rule of Four

The Rule of Four (Dial Press; $24) by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason is a dizzyingly intelligent mystery that has a real life encoded 15th century rare text, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, at it’s core. The premise is simple – a brainy Princeton senior has spent much of his teen years researching the myseries held within a 15th century document – and he’s determined to solve the riddle in time to finish his senior thesis and graduate on time.

Four Princeton roommates Tom Sullivan, Paul Harris, Charlie Freeman and Gil Rankin have been working as an on-again, off-again team to solve the riddle of a manuscript. Tom, the narrator, is the son of a Renaissance scholar who spent his life studying the ancient manuscript and it is no coincidence that Paul, the senior who is basing his thesis (and graduation from Princeton) on solving the siren’s song of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, is at Princeton as Tom’s roommate. Tom and Paul have a tortured, tense but true friendship as they are both individually and mutually sucked into the haunting allure of the mysteries of the Renaissance.

Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, recent graduates of the ivy-lined walls of Princeton, are incredibly facile first time writers. The Rule of Four is not a simple read – there is an immense amount of information packed into its tight 384 pages – but it is a compulsive one. There are so many false starts – or ends – to the big that you find yourself just needing to race ahead to the next conclusion and, as a result, submitting even more to the siren’s song. The Rule of Four is a siren’s song of a book. It’s maddening and frustrating and dense and erudite and so subtle in revealing itself. The very fine mystery found within the Renassaince based manuscript is helped along by a very modern-day mystery caused by intellectual greed and a sheer desire to be an intellectual superior that unfortunately leaves a wake of baseless and stupid violence and death.

The Rule of Four is one of the smartest and intellectual mysteries I’ve read in a long time. It was compulsively readable and totally engrossing. And … if you’re a Princeton graduate or know of one, this is a must read.

Good Grief

Good Grief just took my breath away when I first read it. I received a package from Winston’s publisher, recommending that I take a look at Good Grief. I’m not sure if it was the sincerity in the attached letter or the pink bunny slippers on the cover that was the hook in my mouth, but either way, I’m glad I was hooked.

Sophie Stanton – bride of a short three years – finds herself widowed at an all too early age. She and Ethan had a great three years before Ethan was consumed with cancer. There wasn’t time to develop the fissures and cracks that time bring to marriage, and Sophie isn’t ready to give it all up. Sophie knows Ethan is gone, he’s not coming back, he’s dead, dead, dead. Yet, she’s not willing to take her requisite days off from work and return with a grim face to continue. She wants to take the time to feel her pain and angst. She needs to be with herself, the memories of Ethan and their relationship and time to reflect. Yet, people don’t want to let Sophie be the grieving widow on her own terms.

Winston is amazingly adroit at detailing Sophie’s slow sinking into a deep and heartfelt depression. We clearly realize that Sophie is on her way down when she drives her car through the garage door … and then camps inside her house until she decides it’s time to get back to work. And we also realize that Sophie will be okay – she can only be on her way up – when she chooses to return to work wearing her bathrobe and pink furry bunny slippers.

Good Grief leaves you with such a good feeling. Sophie is okay. She’s been through a long, painful period in her life but she is going to be okay. She’s a different person – having your young husband die when you yourself are at the beginning of a new life would make you a different person. It’s hard to believe that Lolly Winston is a first-time author as she is so adroit at wielding her pen, adept at cutting to the heart of the issue and warm, funny and just all too smart.

The Gilded Chamber

Rebecca Cohn’s The Gilded Chamber (RuggedLand, $23.95) is Queen Esther’s story told through the voice of Queen Esther. I had the same reaction to The Gilded Chamber as I did to The Red Tent (Picador, $14.95). I just could not put this book down – and read it one extended sitting. Cohn seems to have done extensive research on the time period of Queen Esther’s reign and brings us a rich, compelling and compulsively readable view of biblical times.

Codex

Lev Grossman
(Harcourt; $24)

With everyone hunting for the next DaVinci Code, this may just be the next stop. Grossman has created a masterful work of hidden codes and duplicity through the use of literary history, medieval story telling and folklore and very modern day computer gaming. A mix between Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg (Pocket Books;$13.95), Allen Kurzweil's The Grand Complication (Theia;$16) and Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code (Doubleday; $24.95), Grossman has woven an intricate, air tight mystery that turns over and over on itself until the very end.

25-year old investment banker Edward Wozny has been awarded a cushy and coveted overseas position in London and is taking two weeks off (for the first time since graduation) to close his US affairs and relax before his relocation. He promises his boss that he will make a courtesy call to a client - the Wents - during his time off which is where his vacation takes a sharp turn into the bizarre. Before Edward knows it, he's uncrating and indexing an ancient library of forgotten tomes that are a part of the eccentric Went family's holdings. His friends try to lure Edward into the world of vacation and "play" by introducing him to the highly addictive and edgy multi-user computer game, MOMUS.

It seems to be the reader that first notices that something isn't quite right in vacation paradise. Time isn't working as it should, Edward seems to be further sucked into a series of events that are way out of his control and both MOMUS and the Went family have literally swallowed Edward whole. As you read further and further in, nothing seems to be what it is, noone appears to be who they are and the reader is as lost in a dense forest of confusion as Edward is. Before long, reader and Edward seem trapped in an alter world and both fight heroically to resurface and put order to a world that has become frightfully askew.

Grossman has done his homework and drawn the best elements from the puzzle inside a puzzle genre of mystery literature with Codex. A totally compulsive read that leads you down a black hole of time and pulls you straight into the middle of an ordinary world with just about everything a little askew.