This is the kind of "must-read" book BR Myers skewers in A Readers Manifesto, made worse by it being a debut novel by a young handsome author, which makes reviewers turn cartwheels.Sure, there are beautiful images and sentences here, but so what? It was choked by its own irony, by its ironic stance about its irony. The only interesting characters were the minor ones.The rest were boring. And yes, I know they're meant to be boring and pretentious, but that might work in a story or novella; in a novel of this length it just became tiresome.