August 14, 2017
The reader meets Joe Johnson, the articulate narrator of Nicholson’s sharp and thought-provoking novel, at a crossroads in his life. He has recently quit his job, working on unspecified projects involving torture for a bureaucratic group known as the Team. He and wife Carole have divorced, and he’s moved into a new house. The novel ignores conventional plot in favor of episodic encounters that trigger cultural, literary, and historical references and observations. For example, Joe’s current life plan is an epic walk, inspired by the prison peregrinations of Albert Speer—not as a role model, since he was a Nazi, but as a “fellow traveler.” As Speer was limited by his incarceration, Joe will confine himself to a circuit in his back yard. Recording his progress will be a major component of the project, eliciting references to Bruce Chatwin, Rousseau, and others. A flyer on his car leads him to the title character, a Jill-of-all-trades, who becomes his sidekick. The human tendency to violence, the ubiquity of the internet, and the arrogant intrusiveness of the outside world are just some of the themes Nicholson skewers in this sophisticated satire, and indeed the book is at its best during its droll and subtle needling of contemporary American life.
October 15, 2017
This darkly wry new work from Nicholson (The City Under the Skin) opens with a man working with a shadowy, unspecified organization preparing volunteers for the eventuality of torture. What unfolds is not a thriller (despite continuing overtones) but a surprisingly engrossing meditation on human limitation and life's ultimate opacity. Surprisingly, because Joe, the narrator, a psychotherapist dragged into his job because he's been treating mostly former soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, soon quits his job, divorces his wife, and moves to a house with a large yard where he plans to walk daily, eventually completing a distance equal to the circumference of the Earth in some two and a half years. Not so exciting-sounding, but Joe's circumambulations attract the attention of neighbors, including wimpy little Small Paul and his forward mother and obnoxious, security guard father, plus an odd-job woman named Miranda who helps bring the plot to a dramatic climax. Throughout, Joe's deadpan humor contrasts effectively with the quietly disturbing events, and readers are drawn in by the tense undercurrents. VERDICT An excellent, accessible work for readers of literary fiction and thriller fans who like a dose of existential angst.
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