The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences — Oblomov by way of Tama Janowitz and Elizabeth Wurtzl, Bartleby with a touch of Bright Lights, Big City, a lunatic psychiatrist who melds Ayn Rand and William Burroughs — and unnervingly original. It takes guts, after all, to spin a yarn out of a rich Upper East Side orphan who decides to put herself to sleep for a year in an attempt at rebirth. Beyond the evident — the death of her parents, an obnoxious man in her life — precisely why our narrator wishes to shed her skin remains unclear to us; but her tenacity in pursuing oblivion is unshakeable.
At 24, she has already burnt through the beginnings of a working life in Manhattan’s conceptual art scene (for which we can hardly blame her); now, she has enlisted the aid of Dr Tuttle, whose eccentric consultations invariably end with the wholesale distribution of pharmaceutical samples, prescriptions and — most cataclysmically — an unregulated drug called ‘Infermiterol’.
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