It sucks. The first few chapters caught a hold of me dealing with some 20-something dead-enders hanging out in squalor still very much caught up in nostalgia for their high school party days and lamenting about a friend who had committed suicide even though none of them liked her. The novel primarily consists of long droll conversations about high school and events around the time of the suicide and not much else. There's the intro character who's run back to his small town because he killed a junkie in an alley due in part to a song he performed, at least according to him. It seemed in the early chapters that the novel was about to work up to something but it never did. When it started shifting POVs it lost me, so I started speed reading. This book is bland, the conversations were repetitive, and none of the characters were really that great at all in any respect. I cannot recommend this, it's just really boring. ( )

135/54-Η αλήθεια πως δυσκολεύτηκα να ακολουθήσω τη ροή. Ποτέ δε ξεμπέρδεψα τα πρόσωπα και να καταφέρω να ξεχωρίσω ποιος είναι ποιος . Η εντύπωση που μου έμεινε είναι πως η παρέα είναι ένα συνονθύλευμα προβληματικών ανθρώπων , αλκοολικών καταθλιπτικών και ναρκομανών. Απ' αυτούς κάποιοι δεν μπορούν να συνεχίσουν κι αυτοκτονούν, άλλοι βολεύονται κι άλλοι προσπαθούν να συνεχίσουν . ( )

This is juvenilia, but if (like me) you were lucky enough to read it as a juvenile, it will hold a permanent place in your dagger-pierced little heart. In the mid-1970s Dan Lang has fled Icarus, his suburban Virginia hometown, for the high life in New York City and a punk rock band. As the novel opens, Lang is returning to Icarus after flying too close to the flames in New York, and the novel is mostly concerned with sketching the lives of Lang and his dissipated but creative circle of friends--or "grove of buddies," as Carson puts it, displaying an early hint of the surpassingly clever wordplay he will deploy to great effect in 2003's Gilligan's Wake. Here's where the juvenilia comes in: I read this when I was about 14 or 15. Lang and his friends are roughly the same age--early twenties--as the kids who awed and inspired me at that age, but looking back they seem a little silly. One is described as "the writer, actor, and director of two plays before he graduated [high school]." Big deal. It's high school. Nevertheless, Carson is terrific at describing the empty spaces that can develop between old friends as they grow and explore, as well as the black holes that seem to swallow old friends who fail, or refuse, to move on.