The Broom Of The System.

What is this? Where did it come from? Like IJ it takes 200 pages for the heart to show through the jokey surrealism; perhaps unlike IJ I think it'd take 100 of those even on a reread. Like IJ it inconsistent and needlessly wacky at times and some bits just flatly don't work.

But something happens anyway, and it heads towards that black desert like a thing possessed with stars. I must have read him do his tragic-accident / ultra-specialised insanity / people-reduced-to-point-in-logical-problem metastory thing forty or fifty times at least by now - it's never worked like that on me, never.

I'm willing to accept I haven't read much for a year now, that I might have forgotten the tricks that made this do this. But I don't and can't understand how something as perfect as the way RV becomes the Homer to Lenore's Bart only for it to happen later that that switch too is baited and swiped, well I just don't get how a first novel can do that. And I'm back to thinking "eleven years of hurt", and I really thought I was past that.