PositiveCleveland Review of BooksIyer wants readers to take these characters seriously, in the sense that we grow to love them and sympathize with their interior work of becoming. But Iyer also wants us to laugh at them (and maybe by extension ourselves) ... I hear echoes of O’Connor, who wrote that ours is \'an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.\' I can feel the tone of this piece start to teeter into seriousness ... Yet the novel encourages us to adopt a certain kind of hopefulness, so that when we have ceased our ironies and our laughter, when the [Bo] Burnam-esque absurdities no longer suffice, maybe it’s Dostoevsky’s Idiot who will have the last laugh. Possibly his laugh won’t be just another expression of nihilism, a contempt for all created things. Perhaps his laughter will be more like the communal banter that endears us to Iyer’s characters, and which is itself a sympathetic affirmation that existence is good, that our individual lives are good, and good that we exist together.
