This is by far the worst book I've read in 2010. I couldnt even finish it; the thought of having to read another 100 pages of drivel led me to thumb through the last pages, only to realize I wasn't missing anything.
How an author that wrote great novels such as The Book of Illusions or Man in The Dark can produce a book that contains no believable characters, no real story and only superficial and empty phrases is a mystery to me. The main character is a spineless loser, whose greatest accomplishment is 3 weeks of sex with a lacklustre French woman that just got dumped. His moral compass is stuck on 'thou shall not kill', and because he's got no imagination or anything else to show for, his biggest accomplishment is deciding to ruin the killer's life by convincing the killer's fiancee that the killer is a bad man. What an awful revenge. I don't care if he succeeded - if he did, it would be utterly unbelievable.
To add insult to injury, we also have a former classmate, who never saw our spineless zero in 40 years, but suddenly becomes fantastically interested in him - so much that he even considers his sexual exploits with his sister perfectly normal. This classmate is famous for his literary work, however in this book he decides to write like a first grader writing love letters to Lady Gaga. If Auster tried to shock me, he failed. If he tried to bore me, he succeeded. Man, that second part of the book was like a 24hr B&B marathon.
This book was so bad I even threw it away - I couldn't stand the thought of spoiling anyone else's brain with such useless writing.