Biblioklept

“The Last Untamed Writer in America,” another William T. Vollmann profile

August 30, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

Photograph of William Vollmann in his studio by Ian Bates

Late last week, The Wall Street Journal published “The Last Untamed Writer in America,” a profile of William T. Vollmann. The piece begins with its author Alexander Nazaryan politely refusing breakfast scotch from Vollmann, who is hosting Nazaryan at his studio (a converted Mexican restaurant):

It was breakfast time at the Sacramento, Calif., home of the novelist William T. Vollmann, which meant time for scotch. Out came two gold-colored shot glasses, modeled after 50-caliber rounds, a gift from a relative to the gun-loving writer. Despite gentle pressure, I stuck to my coffee, so Vollmann poured himself only a perfunctory nip of the Balvenie DoubleWood 12. “This will get me buzzed up,” Vollmann said. Then he added, ruefully, “I can hardly drink at all anymore.”

The piece has some interesting quips from Vollmann, but it doesn’t really expand on Alexander Sorondo’s long essay “The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann’s Battle to Publish an American Epic,” from this spring–notes on Vollmann’s cancer, getting dropped by his publisher Viking, and finding a home for his epic A Table for Fortune with Skyhorse, an iffy group that has published books by RF Kennedy Jr. and Alex Jones. A lot of the notes will be familiar with those tuned into the myth of the Vollmann (guns, drugs, sex, volume, etc.), but it’s kinda sorta interesting to see how the conservative Wall Street Journal frames Vollmann. They play up Vollmann’s enthusiasm for guns and note that he is not an author to be “cowed by sensitivity readers”; they even get a quote from him decrying “people who want trigger warnings.” And yet even when Vollmann professes a tinge of patriotism, he deflates it immediately:

“I love America because it’s my homeland, and I love Americans,” Vollmann says. “What I dislike is the whole hypocritical American exceptionalism. We do all these dirty, crummy things.”

There are some cool photos by Ian Bates accompanying the article, which you can read unpaywalled here.

A visit to Cormac McCarthy’s “enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library”

August 29, 2025August 29, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Photograph of Cormac McCarthy’s living room by Wayne Martin Belger

The September/October issue of Smithonian Magazine includes a visit to the late Cormac McCarthy’s house in New Mexico. The piece is by Richard Grant, who explains how the visit came about:

I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were embroiled in a herculean endeavor. Working unpaid, with help from other volunteer scholars and occasional graduate students, they had taken it upon themselves to physically examine and digitally catalog every single book in McCarthy’s enormous and chaotically disorganized personal library. They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

It’s a long feature and contributes more information to McCarthy’s biography than I would have thought (please, Josh Brolin, give us McCarthy’s full story about “drinking wine with André the Giant in Paris”). Grant also focuses heavily on the scholarship going into cataloging McCarthy’s library. Grant describes “looking through a batch [of books to be cataloged] about Cistercian abbeys, violin makers, metaphysics, meta-ontology, the incest taboo and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.” We learn that McCarthy owned at least thirteen editions of Moby-Dick. Scholars found uncashed royalty checks to the tune of ten grand bookmarking William Faulkner’s niece’s memoir. Grant also shares some of McCarthy’s annotations, like this one:

In his copy of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, McCarthy penciled his opinion of slip-on dress shoes: ‘disgusting.’ Further down the same page, next to a sentence praising shiny-buckled monk-strap shoes, he wrote, ‘yet more horror.’

The photographs by Wayne Martin Belger are likely to particularly interest McCarthy nerds. My favorite of the batch is a slip of paper in McCarthy’s handwriting, posed atop a Wittgenstein volume. The slip includes what appears to be a rough budget, notes on “Spengler’s number,” and a short grocery list:

“TARTAR SAUCE

CELERY SALT.”

I also dig Belger’s photograph of McCarthy’s gun barrel schematic; check out the piece for more:

Photograph of “Gun books and catalogs including a schematic, hand-drawn by McCarthy, of a plan to make a gun barrel” by Wayne Martin Belger

Another Dalloway

August 28, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs Dalloway is getting a centennial update from publisher NYRB. The new edition is edited by literary critic Edward Mendelson, who makes a persuasive case for his version of the text in the book’s afterword, an essay with the appropriately flat title “The Text of This Edition.” “This edition is an attempt to provide the least bad, perhaps, among many possible editions,” Mendelson writes, before appending after a semicolon: “other editors will rank it more harshly.” I imagine it’s hard work to tidy a giant.

As a point of comparison, I pulled out the HBJ mass-market paperback of Mrs Dalloway that I read at least three times years and years ago; there’s no front or back matter, no intro or afterword, not even a credit for the lovely art. I (a version of myself) had scribbled “symbol is not universal” in the narrow margin of page 41; underlined “narrower and narrower” on page 45; boxed a paragraph catching salmon freely on page 152. Two photographs fell from the book — a picture of my wife and my infant daughter, c. 2008; the other, a picture of my wife and her eighteen-years-younger brother, also an infant in the picture, also held by wife, c. 1998. Those are probably the years I read the book. The older person made more scribbles, I think. What I most remember of the novel Mrs Dalloway is the WWI veteran, Septimus; I recall his anguish as a throbbing (organizing) pulse in the novel’s so-called stream-of-consciousness style. I remember generally enjoying the novel, but preferring Woolf’s Orlando; I remember a sort of sneer on the face of a fellow grad student after this declaration. Orlando is a more fun book, a picaresque sci-fi gender jaunt. I suppose Dalloway is more, like, important.

As another point of comparison, I pulled out the 1990 HBJ trade paperback of Mrs Dalloway that I picked up at the beginning of the summer at a Friends of the Library sale. I wrote in a post about those acquisitions that, “…I’ll be happy to trade out the cheap mass markets of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse I’ve had forever in favor of these HBJ Woolfs (Wolves?)” — but that’s not true. I’ve decided I love the cheap mass market Dalloway. (A sixteen-year-old picture of my wife and daughter falling out of it didn’t hurt.) This 1990 edition features a 1981 introduction by novelist Maureen Howard. She voices her intro in the first-person plural, an unfortunate choice that we employed on this blog in our earlier years, insecure as we were. The occasion of Ms Howard’s introduction is, I think–we think, we mean–the fiftieth anniversary of the novel’s publication, although that math doesn’t add up. I dig Susan Gallagher’s cover art.

The cover for the new NYRB edition features a “specially commissioned” cover that pays “tribute to the original designs by Hogarth Press.” The publisher notes that forthcoming “new editions of To the Lighthouse and The Waves [reprinted] in celebration of their respective centenaries” will also get the cover updates. These editions are also Mendelson edits.

I mostly know Mendelson as the editor of Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, and as the author of “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49.”

NYRB’s edition of Mrs Dalloway publishes next month.

Mass-market Monday | Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma

August 25, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839, Stendhal. Translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Signet Classics (1962). No cover artist credited. 502 pages.

I have fond memories of reading Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. These memories turn out to be faulty, or perhaps more accurately, not indicative of the experience I had of actually reading the book. I went back and read the riffs I wrote nine years ago on the novel, and words like “boredom” and “slog” pop up. From my last riff on the novel:

Balzac was a great admirer of Charterhouse, as was Italo Calvino, and countless writers too. Indeed, the novel is, I suppose, a cult favorite for writers, which makes sense: Stendhal crowds each page with such psychological realism, such rich life, that every paragraph seems its own novel. I’ll admit that by page 400 or so I was exhausted though.

I’ve noted here a few times that Charterhouse is a “Modernist” novel; perhaps “proto-Modernist” is the term I need. (Again—I’m sure that countless lit critics have sussed over this; pardon my ignorant American ass). And yet Charterhouse also points back at the novels before it, the serialized novels, the epistolary novels, the romances and histories and etceteras of the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries. My favorite lines of the novel were often our ironic narrator’s brief asides like, “Doubtless the reader grows tired…” or “The conversation went on for hours more in trivial detail…” or “The letter went on for pages more after the same fashion…” (These aren’t actual quotes, dear reader, but I think I offer a fair paraphrase here). Stendhal’s modernism, or Modernism, or proto-Modernism, or whatever, is his wily irony, his winking at the novel’s formal characteristics. My own failing, then, is to perhaps want more of this. As I wrote last time I riffed on it, what I suppose I want is a postmodern condensation of The Charterhouse of Parma, such as Donald Barthelme’s 1968 story “Eugénie Grandet,” which parodied Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet.

How much of Balzac’s novel is lovingly leapt through right here?!

This wish of mine is of course my failure, not the novel’s.

The Charterhouse of Parma is undoubtedly an oddity, a work of genius, often thrilling, and often an utter slog. I suppose I’m glad that I finally finished it after so many years of trying, but I’m not sure if I got what I wanted out of it. The failure is mine.

I’ll close with the novel’s final line though, which I adore:

TO THE HAPPY FEW

Sunday Comix

August 24, 2025August 18, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Art/text attributed to “Marks.” Back cover of Mother’s Oats Comix #2, August, 1971, Rip Off Press.

“Knocking,” a very short story by Robert Walser

August 21, 2025 Biblioklept1 Comment

“Knocking”

Robert Walser

translated by Tom Whalen and Carol Gehrig

I am completely beat, this head hurts me.

Yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before the day before yesterday, my landlady knocked.

“May I know why you are knocking?” I asked her.

This timid question was turned down with the response: “You are pretentious.”

Subtle questions are perceived as impertinent.

One should always make a lot of noise.

Knocking is a true pleasure, listening to it less so. Knockers don’t hear their knocking; i.e., they hear it, but it doesn’t disturb them. Each thump has something agreeable for the originator. I know that from my own experience. One believes oneself brave when making a racket.

There’s that knocking again.

Apparently it’s a rug being worked on. I envy all those who, thrashing, exercise harmlessly.

An instructor once took several students over his knee and spanked them thoroughly, to impress upon them that bars exist only for adults. I also was among the group beneficially beaten.

Anyone who wants to hang a picture on the wall must first pound in a nail. To this end, one must knock.

“Your knocking disturbs me.”

“That doesn’t concern me.”

“Good, then I shall compliantly see to the removal of this irritation.”

“It won’t hurt you.”

A polite conversation, don’t you agree?

Knocking, knocking! I’d like to stop up my ears.

Also, I once dusted as a servant the Persian carpets for the household of a count. The sound of it echoed through the magnificent landscape.

Clothes, mattresses, etc., are beaten.

So a modern city is full of knocking. Anyone who worries over something inevitable seems a simpleton.

“Go ahead, knock as much as you like.”

“Is that meant ironically?”

“Yes, a little.”

Man Reading a Newspaper — Roland Jarvis

August 21, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Man Reading a Newspaper, c. 1957 by Roland Jarvis (1926-2016)

Annotations on The Guardian’s ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s books

August 18, 2025August 19, 2025 Biblioklept5 Comments

Thomas Pynchon’s ninth novel Shadow Ticket is out fifty days from now. In anticipation, there’s a piece today in The Guardian by John Keenan ranking Pynchon’s books to date.

I undertook a similar silly project just over a year ago on this blog in a post titled “A(nother) completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels” (this list was a correction to a previous 2018 list I foolishly compiled). Lists like these are obviously personal judgments (like, opinions man).

But Keenan’s list is wrong. So here are my annotations.

9. Keenan selects Slow Learner, writing,

A collection of early short stories that is chiefly of interest for the introduction, in which the author spells out why he thinks they fail. Pynchon does not spare himself but, unfortunately, he is right. For aficionados only.

I didn’t include Slow Learner in my rankings because it is not a novel. Pynchon’s intro to it is probably the best thing in it. I agree with Keenan’s assessment here.

8. Keenan selects Against the Day, writing,

Practically plotless, prolix and gargantuan, this novel landed with a thump following a nine-year gap. Characters fragment and double in a bewildering array, the style pastiches pulp novels, adventure stories and science fiction. It does not add up to more than the sum of its admittedly ingenious parts.

This assessment is egregious. Against the Day is perhaps the most directly political of Pynchon’s novels, and, in my estimation, the clearest (if not the most concise) expression of Pynchon’s political sympathies. I ranked it #3, writing: “I think this novel would make an excellent American history textbook. Its thesis: resist the military-industrial-entertainment-complex. Start here!”

7. Keenan selects Bleeding Edge, writing,

Pynchon’s most recent novel is a lightweight. The protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, mother of two, longsuffering partner to a feckless financier, finds herself chasing shadows around Manhattan’s Silicon Alley. Maxine’s skills as a fraud investigator are put to the test unravelling the machinations of the nasty controller of a computer security firm who will do anything to get his hands on a virtual reality simulator called DeepArcher (geddit?). There are plentiful puns, red herrings and surnames that serve as possibly unhelpful acronyms – the usual Pynchon ingredients, in other words. Here they fail to cohere into an entirely satisfying whole.

Bleeding Edge is not top-tier Pynchon, but it’s hardly lightweight. I ranked it #6, writing,

Reading Bleeding Edge helped evoke all the weirdness the 2000s were about to lay out for us. It made me angry again, or reminded me of the anger that I’d sustain for most of the decade. It reminded me of our huge ideological failure after 9/11, an ideological failure we are watching somehow fail even more today. But I also loved the novel’s unexpectedly sweet domestic plot, and found a kind of solace even in its affirmation of family, even as its final image pointed to the kind of radical inconclusiveness at the heart of being a parent.

6. Keenan selects Vineland, writing,

It is 1984, the year of Reagan’s re-election but for Zoyd Wheeler, Los Angeles-based veteran of the radical left, time has stopped. His wife, Frenesi, has left him to raise their daughter, Prairie, alone and he resorts to dismal acts of self-sabotage in order to qualify for government benefits. Prairie, in turn, flees the family coop to track down her mother, a subversive turned informant in league with federal baddy Brock Vond. Pynchon’s themes are prescient – surveillance, media saturation, generational miscommunication – but his aim is off.

I don’t think “Pynchon’s aim is off” is the best metaphor here. I think he hits what he shoots at — his targets are clear, and he’s an author, right? His characters are props he can set out where he likes, guaranteeing a bullseye. But that’s not always satisfying. I think the execution of Vineland is a bit slapdash. The book has always had cult status among Pynchon aficionados, perhaps stemming from a contrarian spirit. Paul Thomas Anderson’s (very) loose film adaptation, One Battle After Another, has also appeared to prompt a lot of reading, rereading, and online chatter about Vineland. I ranked it last in my list, at #8, writing that, “Vineland is ultimately depressing and easily my least-favorite Pynchon novel, but it does have some exquisite prose moments.”

5. Keenan selects V., writing,

Sincerity is not a quality readily associated with Pynchon, but his debut novel displays an affection for his characters that would later take second place to irony. The story bounces between Benny Profane, unemployed sailor, and Herbert Stencil, obsessive seeker of the elusive V. The language shows its age in places, but the plight of people determined to keep themselves in the dark is as relevant as ever.

I love V. and also had it at #5 on my list. Keenan is right that “sincerity” is not associated with Pynchon, but absolutely incorrect that Pynchon’s mode of affection is displaced by irony in the later novels. It’s clear that Pynchon loves Jeremiah Dixon, Charles Mason, Webb Traverse, Roger Mexico, Maxine Tarnow, etc. In my list, I wrote,

I’ll repeat my endorsement that “V. makes a good starting place for anyone new to Pynchon” and recommend that anyone interested in Pynchon but daunted by the scope check out the book from their library and read the ninth chapter, the story of of Kurt Mondaugen.

4. Keenan selects The Crying of Lot 49, writing,

The author regretted publishing this novel but he was being unduly harsh on himself. Short, funny and shot through with allusions you can choose to follow or ignore, the story of Oedipa Maas’s search for the meaning behind the supposed rivalry of postal companies is the literary equivalent of non-Euclidean geometry.

I also had Crying at #4. I wrote,

The Crying of Lot 49 is probably a better novel than V. but I think I like V. better. 49 is very funny and showcases Pynchon’s tonality of paranoia/hope wrapped up in zaniness/horror. It’s an excellent sophomore novel, but also dense, claustrophobic even. I guess I like the Pynchon sprawl a bit better.

3. Keenan selects Inherent Vice, writing,

Wilfully weird, often sordid and occasionally borderline unintelligible, Pynchon’s seventh novel was adapted for the big screen by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. The adaptation was nominated for an Oscar, making Pynchon as mainstream as he’s ever likely to get. Larry “Doc” Sportello is a private investigator with a broken heart and a huge appetite for marijuana. His ex-girlfriend reappears out of nowhere, implores Doc to find her married lover, then promptly vanishes again. At the heart of the murky tale lurks the sinister presence of the Golden Fang, a vessel that means, as Doc surmises, “a lot of things to a lot of people” – all of them unsavoury.

I love Inherent Vice, but it’s hardly top-three! I had it at #7, above Vineland.

2. Keenan selects Gravity’s Rainbow, writing,

This kaleidoscopic tour de force cemented Pynchon’s reputation as a writer of baffling, farcical and profound genius. A chief delight is his brilliant ear for dialogue which is given full rein in this twisted tale of allied intelligence officers, Nazis, scientists and seers united by a MacGuffin in the shape of a mysterious rocket. The action arcs from London under bombardment to a postwar zone of surrender. What is striking is how the themes explored here – forever wars, technological domination, uncontrollable cartels – have become staples of internet discourse.

I had Mason & Dixon at #2 and Gravity’s Rainbow at #1.

1 . Keenan selects Mason & Dixon, writing,

Pynchon gives the 18th-century novel a postmodern twist to explore the relationship between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. . . The author layers fact over anachronistic fiction, scientific inquiry over conspiratorial rumour, and tragedy over knockabout farce, in a virtuoso display of storytelling. . . It is a ripping yarn spun for the incredulous enjoyment of both the cleric’s family and the grateful reader.

Here’s what I wrote in my (thoroughly unnecessary) list:

2. Mason & Dixon (1997)

A measurement of the world and a story about friendship. It would be Pynchon’s best novel if he hadn’t written—

1. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

The best book.

Rankings are stupid fun, and I appreciate Keenan giving me an opening for some stupid fun on a Monday morning when I should really be prepping for the onset of the fall semester. I’ll close with a more honest ranking — all of these books are good, most are excellent, and at least two are American classics. It might be better to rank Pynchon’s oeuvre on one of those dorky tier lists.

So here is my dorky unnecessary Pynchon tier list:

Sunday Comix

August 17, 2025August 16, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

From “The Creature in the Tunnels” by Rory Hayes. Published in Bogeyman Comics #1, 1969, Twelve A.M. Publications.

Self-Portrait — Flannery O’Connor

August 13, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Self-Portrait, 1952 by Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

The Villages — Barnaby Whitfield

August 13, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

The Villages, 2023 by Barnaby Whitfield (b. 1970)

Easy to hang puppets

August 13, 2025August 12, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

An aphorism from Stanislaw J. Lec’s Unkempt Thoughts with an illustration by Barbara Carr. Translation by Jacek Galazka.

Our perceptual relationship with the world works because we trust prior stories | Umberto Eco

August 12, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Our perceptual relationship with the world works because we trust prior stories. We could not fully perceive a tree if we did not know (because others have told us) that it is the product of a long growth process and that it does not grow overnight. This certainty is part of our “understanding” that a tree is a tree, and not a flower. We accept a story that our ancestors have handed down to us as being true, even though today we call these ancestors scientists.

No one lives in the immediate present; we link things and events thanks to the adhesive function of memory, both personal and collective (history and myth). We rely upon a previous tale when, in saying “I,” we do not question that we are the natural continuation of an individual who (according to our parents or the registry office) was born at that precise time, on that precise day, in that precise year, and in that precise place. Living with two memories (our individual memory, which enables us to relate what we did yesterday, and the collective memory, which tells us when and where our mother was born), we often tend to confuse them, as if we had witnessed the birth of our mother (and also Julius Caesar’s) in the same way we “witnessed” the scenes of our own past experiences.

This tangle of individual and collective memory prolongs our life, by extending it back through time, and appears to us as a promise of immortality. When we partake of this collective memory (through the tales of our elders or through books), we are like Borges gazing at the magical Aleph—the point that contains the entire universe: in the course of our lifetime we can, in a way, shiver along with Napoleon as a sudden gust of cold wind sweeps over Saint Helena, rejoice with Henry V over the victory at Agincourt, and suffer with Caesar as a result of Brutus’ betrayal.

And so it is easy to understand why fiction fascinates us so. It offers us the opportunity to employ limitlessly our faculties for perceiving the world and reconstructing the past. Fiction has the same function that games have. In playing, children learn to live, because they simulate situations in which they may find themselves as adults. And it is through fiction that we adults train our ability to structure our past and present experience.

From Umberto Eco’s lecture “Fictional Protocols,” part of Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

Sunday Comix

August 10, 2025August 3, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

From “The Lobster” by Jack Cole, Plastic Man #4, July 1946, Quality Comics.

Paul Kirchner’s metaphysical trip continues in The Bus 3

August 7, 2025 BibliokleptLeave a comment

Paul Kirchner’s surreal comic strip The Bus is a looping, deadpan fugue of modern alienation and mechanical ritual, where a lone Commuter drifts through absurd, Escher-like permutations of transit life.

The Commuter’s foil and ferry is the titular bus (which Kirchner himself described as “demonic” in a 2015 essay in The Boston Globe); his Charon (and, really, partner) is the bus’s Driver. Each Bus strip is a double-decker one-pager rendered in precise black ink; most strips are wordless and consist of six or eight panels. Kirchner uses these constraints to conjure metaphysical gags that upend the banality of everyday existence. The previous two sentences that attempt to describe Kirchner’s formal techniques are a poor substitute for an example — so here is an example:

The strip above is the first entry in Kirchner’s new collection, The Bus 3. This strip neatly ushers us into The Bus’s charms. Old partners Commuter and Driver reunite; the bus subtly transforms into a theater; the Commuter turns to witness the loop start anew. Is there an exit? And would the Commuter want to escape the loop?

The second strip reaffirms Kirchner’s commitment to the Commuter’s eternal return. Our hapless hero is a kind of chthonic demigod, simultaneously plastic and immutable, wholly absurd:

The Bus’s first route was between 1978 and 1985 in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine. French publisher Tanibis Editions republished this original run in 2012. In 2015, they published The Bus 2, a sequel of new material. In my review, I wrote that “The Bus 2, like its predecessor, is a remarkably and perhaps unexpectedly human strip.” The same is true for The Bus 3. Kirchner’s strips demonstrate that the absurdity of the modern condition, for all its dulling machinations, reaffirms humanity and the imaginative, artistic vision as a site of surreal resistance.

I kept The Bus 3 out on my coffee table the entire summer. I tried not to gobble up all the strips right away, but rather to read one or two a day, each page a small treat against the absurdity of the day. As I reached the end of the volume a week ago, I found myself strangely moved by the last three strips. Kirchner’s Möbius strips always send the Commuter back to his starting position. These last three pull the same move, but with a difference. In the first of the final three, the Commuter dies (waiting on the Driver, natch) and his spirit ascends. In eight speechless panels, Kirchner retells Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.”

The penultimate strip, a gag on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons literally deflates the bus. The crowd has left, but the Commuter remains, stoic, waiting. And the last proper strip shows a techno-utopian future with a splendid flying bus — but our Commuter refuses to board. His neck stooped, he wanders to the outskirts of town to find the apocalyptic wreckage of his beloved broken down bus. It’s a lovely moment.

Has Kirchner retired his Commuter? Perhaps. The last page of the book shows our hero somehow looking bemused in a folding lawn chair, a cold one in his hand. He sits in front of the bus, now converted to an immobile home, scene of domestic bliss, maybe, everything tranquil and normal (just ignore the fish).