RaveEsquireSave for a rueful coda set in 2006, it is a novel about beginnings rather than endings, and yet, like downtown New York itself, it is shadowed by a shadow no longer there, and one can scarcely imagine it being written without that opportunity for rue … It is a book so humane in its understanding of original sin that it winds up bestowing what might be called original absolution, and it is a pre-9/11 novel that delivers the sense that so many of the 9/11 novels have missed.
