Colonel Mint provides a pleasant donnée: an astronaut in action sees an angel and says so. Most of the novel concentrates on the torments subsequently invented to force him to recant. One can surmise why the author might have thought it funny: long ago men suffered for their divergences from religious faith; now the state's destruction of deviants is as certain as the Inquisition's; such parallel and reversal is the stuff of comedy…. This is supposed to be an "extravagant comic novel," but the experience of reading it is simply depressing. For one thing, there's the quality of the prose: "I know who you think I am. A handy man, that's all. Husband, father—dead from the neck up. But I'm more than that. Shit, shit, yes. You want me to be like all the rest of them." And the quality of the mind behind it, manipulative...