It's quite the rollercoaster ride, this book. Any attempts to reduce it to something pithy and sharp feels off in some respect. Is it a metaphysical farce? Is it a screwball satire on art and artists? Is it a highly intellectual adventure? You spend the entire book with one man, perhaps the world's most insufferable overthinker, as he gets overwhelmed by an extremely elaborate, continents-spanning plot. You eventually get the impression of a man, presently consumed with Rudolf Steiner's thoughts on spirituality, who so desperately wants to distance himself from a messy humanity (mainly characterized by a scheming, grimy, lawless, 1970s Chicago) whose constant propulsions and collisions become more and more impossible to evade (viewed through a modern lens, it can actually be considered a book-length argument for how the term "introvert" is nothing more than a sympathetic rebranding of "being a crassly antisocial, isolated jerk.") Can you sustain a one-thing-after-another, coincidence-laden, farce-like pace over 500 pages of text, though? Maybe? Almost? You never quite get lost, even as yet another name is thrown onto the pile, and yet another secret is unraveled, and yet another philosophical treatise is expounded. But, at the same time, there were too many moments where I slid my bookmark in at night and said, "No more. No more book. Please, please, no more book," and not at all in a teasing, curious way. I feel like this one's been forgotten, which it shouldn't, it's quite the unique novel—I can't think of too many modern urban novels that remind you of a relentless Indiana Jones film. But you kind of end the rollercoaster ride sensing the whole thing was soundly built, craftily designed, even inspired (I mean, instead of a giant boulder, the guy's trying to outrun humanity itself) but still lacking some sort of ... hard to place ... perhaps even harder to conjure ... spark. Maybe it simply needed more laughs. Three stars.