I loved the first few pages of this, and then... meh. Ambivalent I guess. Fox can write beautifully, although a tad too florally for my taste. But the real problem here is the 'mysterious stranger interrupts otherwise banal existence' plot device, see also Greene's 'Travels with my Aunt,' combined with completely opaque psychological motivations in almost every character, with the exception of George's sister, Lila. That, combined with the feeling that conversations from a Pynchon novel are inexplicably taking place in Yates' fictional universe, meant that I was just puzzled for most of this book. That said, I'm willing to give 'Desperate Characters' a try, in the hopes that it keeps the great bits of this book - the black humor, the perfectly chosen symbols and the way that ordinary moments bear an enormous amount of meaning - and gets rid of the irritants. ( )