February 13, 2012
Iyer's sequel to Spurious (and the second in an as-yet-incomplete trilogy) can best be labeled a "philosopher's novel," insofar as it suffers from many of the shortcomings that generally turn readers off philosophical literature: it's abstract and dry. The novel relates the travels of two British academics as they pass through American cities on a lecture tour. The narrator, Lars, has been invited to travel alongside W., who is professionally engaged in waxing Marxian about matters too cliché to be convincing: "Capitalism is the evil twin of true religion, said W....And money is the false God we worship." W. and Lars chat amongst themselves while the specter of some kind of perceived cultural apocalypseâwhich Lars dubs "The Age of Shit"âlooms on the horizon. There are moments of insight and humor scattered throughout, but in the end the novel collapses into abstraction and it's hard to tell Lars and W. apart. Both narrator and protagonist lack meaningful physical attributesâthey're merely thoughts.
February 15, 2012
This sequel to Iyer's Spurious brings back W. and Lars, perhaps the most unlikely and absurd literary duo since Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon. This is a loosely constructed philosophical comedy with an episodic feel. (Spurious began as a series of blog posts, and this novel feels similar.) While there is a minimal plot (W. and Lars take a trip to America; they start an intellectual/performance art movement they call Dogma; W. worries about losing his professorship in departmental cutbacks), there's little in the way of change or character development. But that's really not the point. Rather, this book is about the crazily dysfunctional friendship of the main characters (one of whom may be a projection of the other's imagination), filled with cuttingly witty insults, and W.'s acid take on nearly everything. VERDICT Like Godot, this novel is a philosophical rumination, at once serious and playful, on the nature of existence and meaning. While it's comic, there is at bottom a profoundly tragic sense of the chaos and emptiness of modern life. Despair has rarely been so entertaining.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA
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