Title: Fancy digressions but no core
Product review: The book promises to be right up my alley. It's about lost love, it's set among New York artsy Yuppies, and its narrative is a formal experiment. A broken couple's story, beginning the morning of the new millenium, moves freely in time and point of view, broken by a true almanac of famous dates, to chart as well a parallel love of the man's grandfather regained after decades. Only we never get any clearer sense of what drove any of them together in the first place, apart, or back together. The prose is blandly elegaic, and the digressions, which could have been copied verbatim from an encyclopedia, never convinced me that the events are somehow paradigmatic of history or, conversely, that the historical anecdotes and Y2K shed any light on the couple. So ambitious but forced and numbing.
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