false 4 0 false false Wed Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 16 04:10:00 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 16 04:24:50 -0700 2009 It's like a house of mirrors which defies attempts to establish who or what is "real". The wikipedia page lists any number of theories as to which characters are aliases or aspects of others, which is fascinating but, I feel, misses the point: the book is satirising critics and their over-elaborate analyses.
By the way, Mary McCarthy's painfully pretentious introduction almost put me off reading it at all, but afterward I found out that she was a noted satirist in her own right - maybe her introduction is part of the joke...?]]>