It's almost impossible to read this book with any sort of objective eye in the year 2013. It was written in the six years leading up to 2001 and released a week after 9/11. To've read it in, say, August 2001 - that would be the ideal. Because it isn't just the 9/11 thing that is prescient but rather the entire novel. Imagine a world without Facebook, without Twitter, without iPhones, without any of it. Then, imagine an author feeling those inevitable realities, maybe not in those forms but in their most basic thought-stages, and trying to express what creeping rot-of-the-soul lay underneath the feel-good 90s. This is the sort of novel that should make you want to write a paper (or several) just to parse all of the thoughts that it inspires. The only thing? It's a bit rocky at times, a bit too long, a bit... dare I say unfinished? It still feels like it never quite got where it wanted to go, although that aspired position was hands and heads above where just about anyone else can reach. You can see the seeds of Ms. Egan's later, more daring works here - and for that alone, it's well worth reading.More at RB: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-GG
