Carrigan approaches the millennium New Year craving climax and culmination. What he finds instead is constant anti-climax, and lack of definitional consequence for his failures and failings and genius. A conceptual heir to Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, this novel explores everything from Carrigan's past in the spelling bee as a contemptuous 12-year-old, to his father's death in Ireland years before, to the depth of mystery, violence, and secrecy that he returns to, both existentially, and ...