The novel's protagonist, Joe Starling, is a failed painter coming to terms with that failure, with his father's legacy, and with his own inadequacies and obsessions. Largely an observer of other people's lives, and not always a perceptive one at that, Starling's detachment from other people and things settles around him like snow. Yet he acknowledges his detachment wistfully and with a full measure of self-criticism, as when he notes that his character is "composed almost strictly of things I hate in other people."

On the other hand, Starling is presented with few examples of a commitment to values more compelling than his own. His father is ruthless; Mr. Overstreet is obsessed with completing his land's symmetry; and his friend Ivan Slater, another of the "new industrialists" in the C. J. Clovis mode, is devoted to a pet scheme of marketing a home lie detector. The odd, parodic...