David Brooke—who talks of himself in a split-personality manner—narrates a framing tale that consists of him "smuggling" his essence into eight autobiographical manuscripts, although their connection with Brooke is not always clear.

In ordinary English, a "smuggler's bible" refers to a book with a cutout in the body of the pages, suitable for hiding small items when the covers are closed.

His name is David Brooke....[H]e senses that I—I—am his propulsion....I inhabit him.Forty-two-year-old Peter St. John runs an antiquarian bookstore in Brooklyn Heights.

the blue address book This manuscript consists of first person accounts by Mary Clovis, James Judah Lafayette, Abby Love, and Alonzo Morganstern, all residents on the same floor of the Kodak Hotel, now a boarding house.

Eventually she finds an odd machine in his closet, with screw-rods and other things she can't figure out, but her description satisfies Selbstein's curiosity.

blind john jones and the ice-cream sculpture David's mother Julia, 60, is reading a cablegram telling of the time of arrival that afternoon of her seven-week-old granddaughter Julie at Idlewild, giving time but not the flight, while her daughter Ann and son-in-law Dan stay in London sightseeing, headed to Israel.

suicide in a camel's hair coat the canal street hypnotist the black box integration and the man upstairs In this immensely interesting but bafflingly fragmented first novel, Joseph McElroy sets before the reader a truly impressive display of masterly craftsmanship and recondite virtuosity.

[It] is a remarkable novel... To ignore it would be as shameful an act of blind self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when The Recognitions and Under the Volcano were first published.McElroy has every gift that can blandish us into being entertained: dialogue, characterization, topography, wit... [T]his steeplechase of a novel [takes] all the jumps with a style none of his contemporaries has equalledMcElroy explicitly acknowledged the influence of William Gaddis The Recognitions in an interview,[2] and also in his "Neural Neighborhoods" essay, where McElroy states he was already well into his own novel when he read the Gaddis novel.

One McElroy passage makes a rather direct allusion: I tried to go on with a one-thousand-page novel I was reading, ... "Giorgio examined his nails, not, as men do, fingers in against the palms, but rather in the manner of women, the whole long irregular oval of the back of the hand beautiful and banked.

Not as a man does, the fingers turned in upon the palms, but like a lady, at the back of the extended hand so that she may admire the slim beauty of her fingers.Professor Duke Amerchrome is an academic fraud, an addition to the catalog of quacks, counterfeiters, and art forgers in the Gaddis novel.