Reviewed by Nathan Knapp

This novel is a refreshing burst of madness, a flood of lunacy in a literary culture generally interested in its opposite: sanity, so-called. In the end—lest I overemphasize this one aspect of the book over all the others—it’s also a moving meditation on fatherhood, sonhood, and both what it means to be a family, and be a part of one. Despite its surface anachronisms, it’s here that the book leans toward the timeless, filled with startling wisdoms: “We begin to see the virtues of our birth fathers only after the fathers we thought would replace them have disappointed us in turn. By then of course it is too late.” And “it is because she loves [her father] so much . . . that as long as they live a friendly word will never pass between them.” And “at bottom there was between us a mutual substrate of mutual loathing that safeguarded for each of us the autonomy and actuality of the other.” I could go on quoting. In fact, it would likely be better if this review were relieved entirely of my words and simply filled with quotes from Sachs’s excellent book. The muscular delicacy of his achievement—with its subtle and complex treatment of familial love, familial hostility, familial pain, both shared and unknowingly-shared—cannot be overstated. I hope it will find the recognition it deserves.