This book annoys me. I'm midway through and I'm finding it so annoying that I can't finish it -- but I want to know what happens, and chiefly I want to kvetch about it. So it must be doing something. I'm not a "fan" of Michael Cunningham but did think Specimen Days incredible, if ridiculously bleak. The writing was better. This reads like his first (possibly very juvenile) autobiographical novel that some publisher convinced him to "work on" after he became successful. It didn't work. It's over-written -- too many adjectives competing for space and cluttering up the images. The female characters are one-dimensional and written as parodies of faghags; they have no drive except a fear of aging (and losing their "beauty"), resulting in the desire to entrap men coded as queer. And for an ostensibly queer novel, the descriptions of sex are so mannered and unimaginative. Boring. And the male characters are kind of self-absorbed. Ugh. Well, whatever.