The first of these, Alex Klima, is a Czech psychiatrist who has been hired to treat Simon for his depression.

Kate Kellaway in The Guardian noted that "Perlman's novel is a colossal achievement, a complicated, driven, marathon of a book...The prose is lucid and intense...At the end, in a comprehensive, an almost Shakespearian way, Perlman picks up every loose thread and knots it.

One learns all the things one has most keenly wanted to know from a fresh character, at a new, transformative remove.

He is obviously dismayed by the corrosion of public values - corporate greed and excess, the dismantling of public health and education, the failings of the criminal justice system and even the ruinous influence of deconstruction on the study and appreciation of literature.

The impact of what might have been an incisive vision of our world is dissipated, however, by this novel's excessive length, by its structure and by the almost unrelieved uniformity of voice.