MixedPop MattersIn rendering his most avant-garde characters as members of a kind of self-help conspiracy, Scapellato offers not an update but a revision of absurdism, and as such, many social phenomena ripe for satire get off easy. There are so many circles-within-circles that would bind Stan in a Kafka-esque way -- graduate school, Chicago gentrification, artsy tourism to Prague -- none of which are as important as his quintessentially American struggle to be himself ... While we get the sense that Stanley is a pretty taciturn guy, his \'noir\' narration strains credibility at times ... a well-plotted and frequently funny novel. But by the end, you might wish that Scapellato had given freer rein to the quirkier elements of his narrative. The demented Dada energy gets wrangled up and fitted into the plot, and the result is a novel that, like its protagonist, is keeping it all together of the sake of keeping it together, when what it wants to do is run amok.
