Someone recently told me that, for all it's beauty, she couldn't get through the The Dead Fish Museum because it was too depressing. All due respect, this person was not reading. She was simply taking the D'Ambrosio world at face-value – mental hospitals and recovery wards, failing businesses, porno sets – a world which, on the surface, appears to resemble that of William Vollman. But in comparison, Vollman buckles. His bleakness is a fey spectacle which bullies its readers into a pre-fab discomfort. Rather, D'Ambrosio does a far harder thing, which is to achieve compassion without sentiment, yearning without nostalgia, understatement without self-consciousness, and in doing so succeeds at everything Vollman fails at.