While the characters are strongly built and an interesting structural device has been built in, YELLOW JACK never quite gets off the ground. Every once in awhile the characters will do things simply to push the story in the direction the author wants, and the novel itself doesn't really seem to have a point or any sort of conviction. What is quite admirable are the museum catalog descriptions that extrapolate from the speaker's life based on his art, and then the actual descriptions on that life from the speaker himself. But in the end its not quite worth the effort.