Abish as an experimentalist is writing this book using German stereotypes: he's started from the premise of culling through all the German stereotypes in his mind, and then he activates them in a story format. The characters and situations and histories he comes up with are all a bit off, not quite real, and being a very agile writer Abish captures this residue of unreality and feeds into it: the sexual, casual, familial, friendly relationships, the fumbled acquaintances are all nudged subtly by Abish, paragraph by paragraph, into a really tactile, amplified, and very engaging read.