good heavens this was painful

the first half of the book is charlie kaufman restructuring the basic woody allen/larry david character for the 21st century: the nebbish yet inexplicably popular with women middle-age white male, integrated with every "beta male"/"soy boy" stereotype to form a hideous creature whose ramblings about paying lip service to "wokeness" while secretly getting off on being humiliated populate roughly three hundred pages

i feel like i felt when i was watching Adaptation, which is to say, what you get when charlie kaufman is not directed towards more fruitful pursuits and away from his primary obsession: charlie kaufman

anyway the second half of the book goes a bit away from that, and in the process, disintegrates into various plot threads that "intertwine", or rather, clip through each other like videogame characters with shitty hitboxes. nothing builds upon anything else - if anything, things subtract from each other. in a chapter tonally and characteristically isolated from the entire rest of the novel, the protagonist fucks a mountain.

the book ends, at some point. small mercies