SOURCE: “Going Around in Circles,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 21, 1997, p. 21.

In the following review, Brandmark offers an unfavorable assessment of A Regular Guy.

Tom Owens is “a man too busy to flush toilets.” A rich entrepreneur who gives his biotech companies biblical names, a potential politician who wants to shake up the state school system, he is so legendary that people gossip about his girlfriends with the same awe and titillation which the ancient Greeks must have felt when they described Zeus’ affairs with mortal women. In his arrogance and power, his belief that he can ignore the moral code of ordinary people, he resembles two other American heroes: Citizen Kane and Jay Gatsby. Like Kane, he is obsessed with his origins, with the mother he never knew. Perhaps this explains his interest in “sequencing the human genome,” in discovering the structure of human identity. Like Gatsby...