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i finally got around to reading this book and it reminds me of an urban photography class i took in college. we had this assignment where we had to photograph landmarks, things that were essentially philadelphia, without taking pictures of statues or the liberty bell or anything that was actually a landmark. i came in with a photo of the kimmel center and was pretty confident about its composition, color, and rhythm. everyone put up their photos for one of those 3hr crits and the instructor, in typical studio style, managed to find something terribly wrong with each person’s work.
the problem with my photo was that it looked too nice—that it was impossible to take a bad photograph of the kimmel center. the architecture was too interesting, there were too many possibilities for success. that’s how i felt about this story. there are some interesting, inventive uses of dialogue, but at the end of the day there was a story to be told and he told it. in an entertaining but entirely self-absorbed manner. but the novel does pose a couple of interesting questions: what are we owed? why are we owed?
