It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and was a finalist that year for the National Book Award,[1] eventually losing out to Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke.

In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten called the book "a notable piece of first fiction -- at once deeply serious about questions of consequence and refreshingly mindful of traditional storytelling conventions."

(Rutten did criticize what he called the author's "casual obeisance to fashionable postmodernism" in choosing to use his name for the fictional narrator.

"[3] The Independent's Boyd Tonkin described it as "an updated Somerset Maugham yarn", "[l]ush in its landscapes, dense in its ideas, always startlingly nimble and witty".

[4] A less positive review came from Sophia Asare of Entertainment Weekly, who gave the book a B-minus grade, calling it "a rich yet cumbersome travelogue".