A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time
and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author
of White Noise and Underworld can tell it.
In this potent and beautiful novel, the writer The New York Times
calls "prophetic about twenty-first-century America" looks into the mind
and heart of a scholar who was recruited to help the military
conceptualize the war.
We see Richard Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the
desert, in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a
filmmaker and by Elster's daughter Jessica--an "otherworldly" woman from
New York. The three of them build an odd, tender intimacy, something
like a family. Then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal
grief, and it is a human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and
mind.