Derek Bartholomew’s Reviews > Omensetter's Luck > Status Update
Derek Bartholomew
is on page 157 of 315
This is one of the most frustrating but rewarding, bleak but comical, books I’ve ever read.
If I hadn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses before this I don’t know if I would even try to finish this book. But similarly with Joyce, you have to read onwards, and it all starts to come into focus.
The first two chapters were hilarious. But Jethro Furber’s interior monologues are rageful, hateful, obscene. A real villain.
— Sep 24, 2026 05:09PM
If I hadn’t read Joyce’s Ulysses before this I don’t know if I would even try to finish this book. But similarly with Joyce, you have to read onwards, and it all starts to come into focus.
The first two chapters were hilarious. But Jethro Furber’s interior monologues are rageful, hateful, obscene. A real villain.
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Derek Bartholomew
is on page 265 of 315
“Truth is the father of lies, nothing survives, nothing dies; only the wicked can afford the wise.”
At first, I thought this novel was a comedy; the first few chapters are indeed comical. This novel, however, is a tragedy of the first order, as grand as any of Shakespeare’s, and distinctly American too.
— Sep 25, 2026 05:42PM
At first, I thought this novel was a comedy; the first few chapters are indeed comical. This novel, however, is a tragedy of the first order, as grand as any of Shakespeare’s, and distinctly American too.

