Satin Island: A Novel

"Tom McCarthy himself writes in the novel (parenthetically, how else?): “(events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now).” So it’s not a page-turner, but it is a mind-turner, and sometimes that kind of book hits the spot. The nameless protagonist (OK, he has a name: U) is a corporate anthropologist — he studies businesses as cultures — and is inspired by events around him (failed parachute in news; oil spill; friend’s cancer; girlfriend’s interrogation by sinister forces) to develop a Grand Theory of Everything. No real story results, but the thinking and the sentence-writing are breathtaking."