"Harold Brodkey's first novel is a great American wager: shameless, touting and defiant, it offers us its God-defying originality. Originality is the novel's ambition, its procedure and its subject" - James Wood, Guardian. "Wiley, the book's narrator, puts his soul under the microscope and dissects his relationships with his parents, his disturbed sister, and all the fragments of influence which have formed his personality. It is a work of Proustian complexity and brilliance, surely to become the cult of the decade" - Kate Saunders, Cosmopolitan.