““This heady mixture of the philosophical and the dramatic runs throughout the book, the one underlying the other, and the result, unlikely though it may be, is a seamless unity rather than an awkward tugging of opposites. Life is talk, after all, lots of it—crude, bawdy, serious, occasionally transcendent—and that’s what Whittemore gives us. It’s also a world of action and of unthinkable violence—in this century particularly like no other—and Whittemore gives us that, too. Because of the stream of conversations, memories, theories and thoughts that make up so much of the book, it’s easy to overlook the significant amount of violence contained within it.””
