I'm not going to write a dissertation here, but I have to plug this book. It's the best read I've found in a long time. I had read Nothing Is Terrible, his excellent and weird modern-day Jane Eyre first novel, and was so pleased to see his second one at the bookstore. The Sleeping Father is so successful as a serious and as a comic novel-- the ambivalences and fraught silences and cruelties and faux pas that bedevil friendship, family, religion and civilization as a whole are rendered so truthfully-- you may laugh, you may cry, I don't know how you deal with those things, but I can almost guarantee you'll cringe repeatedly. Every character screws up in the most recognizable and inevitable ways... and everyone does such a ridiculous misguided job of trying to compensate... it's just a really really good book. Really.