.Sandra dies suddenly at a death conference in Nepal attended by academics and mystics. Days later, back in America, her teenage son, Trip, runs away with a man who picks him up on the side of a road. Sandra tries to get a message back to Trip through the mystics, but the mystics are distracted, and her son and the strange man set out to sea.
A transcendent and dazzlingly weird novel about disconnection and difference ... These dizzying, bizarre details are relayed in a matter-of-fact deadpan that leaves the reader never quite sure how to feel about what’s happening. Even as I marveled at Barrodale’s inventiveness...I couldn’t shake off a quiet but persistent disorientation ... And yet, by the end, my confusion and annoyance almost felt like the point ... In this light, the novel’s strangeness comes to seem entirely intentional, and brilliant.
The split-screen narration underscores the strange divisions in this ungainly, fabulist book. Ms. Barrodale is attracted to, and rather good at, depicting chaos and absurdity ... But Trip is also keen to impose order on all this rueful happenstance, so Ms. Barrodale includes lectures that purport to fit everything into the schema of Buddhist philosophy. Bizarrely, she even footnotes her sources...as though this were a term paper ... The book’s vying impulses work against one another, leaving readers with memorable, scattered scenes but a faint and diminished whole.
Wacky though these excursions into the otherworld may be, Barrodale roots them in precise, mundane details. Some are startling in their evocative exactness, including numerous recitals of food and fashion choices, complete with brand names ... A remarkable ear for dialogue ... Nimbly ironic.
