thoughts
While reviewing the annotations I made in this book, I found the following description of the spinning two-headed coin (and stand-in for dualism): "Closer, it is just a brassy blur. Closer still and it is nothing." (Cleverly, the next line is "The crowd roars approval.") As others have suggested above, this…

DeMaus, dumbass…the three scholars weren't on stage for very long, but I suspect that every use of the word "privileging" was a swipe at them.

"Is Dobyns saying that these kinds of religious arguments are absurd and pointless and just get in the way of us living our lives?"

I read the same edition, Laika, and I noticed what you're talking about. At first I thought it was a typo, but now I'm inclined to say it was intentional, because I think it's Violet with Michael at the end, but the narrator still calls her Rose White. Also, Rahab's name kept changing earlier in the story (Rahab the…

Repetition
I'm intrigued by the idea that the repetition—which I, too, found frustrating at times—was designed to elicit our sympathy for Michael. That's plausible, for sure, and I think it's a better justification for the repetition than the notion that mythic formula demands it (mainly because it annoys me when…

I thought it was Violet at the end—for several reasons, but one is that her eyes were yellowish like Violet's, and we learned that the institute couldn't fix eyes. (Therefore Pseudo-Marduk squinted a lot.) I also interpreted the absence of White family members at the wedding as evidence that Violet was afraid her…

The funny overshadowed the philosophy for me as well. I suppose it's possible that he tried to write a Vonnegutian kind of a book, but failed. Not that he completely failed, and not that his intentions ultimately matter.

oh, and I probably should have clarified that another one of those levels is that the author himself was doing a study (or thought experiment).

I agree about this being more a thought experiment than a novel. From a marketing standpoint, this book has a horrible title, but in retrospect we know that the title can pretty much be taken literally. Perhaps the title works on multiple levels, but on one level, we understand that Violet White performed a "cruel…

I dug it
I loved the intrusive narration (as well as Muldoon's narration), mainly because it was simply entertaining to read. It was frequently funny, usually vivid, and not too distracting—well, it was distracting, but by the end of the novel I thought the narrative voice was the best part of the book (early in the…

I was reading the thread about meeting athletes in Wisconsin when I remembered that I also played pickup basketball with Heisman winner Ron Dayne. He's like 5'8" and 260, so he didn't have much game either.

Built To Spill's Doug Martsch
I once played pickup basketball with him at the downtown Boise YMCA in the early '00s. I recognized him because my former roommates in Missoula were big fans, but I didn't tell him that. He had some sort of bandage/splint contraption on his hand—this hurt his game, though I don't think…

Norval
Sure, I'll give some love for Norval. His journal entries weren't quite seamless as a literary device (in that their introduction made me think for a second, "Oh, what a clever literary device"), but they did present a somewhat more objective, outsider-ish perspective than Oly could offer, and they did so…

show and tell
I don't think Dunn has *fully* mastered the show-don't-tell rule. If anything, she has mastered only the "don't tell" part. If all the reader can do is make nearly baseless speculations for why Oly killed herself, for example, then the author has achieved ambiguity not by presenting a wealth of…

It seems that Lick is not really turning people into Binewski-style freaks. It's not as if an acid-scarred, breastless woman is gonna get a job in the carnival. In some sense, the women start as freaks (because, like the Binewskis, they can get by on socially useless physical qualities) and become people who, if…