I really liked Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, so I’d been meaning to read his follow up novel for a while. There’s a nice writeup of it, including an excerpt, at Random House’s website. I finally got it from the library a couple weeks ago. Whitehead is a really good writer. His observations of modern life are interesting, and his descriptions are often sumptuous. He still needs a bit of work on plotting - the vignettes on the lives of peripheral characters were often more interesting than the main story line. Recommended.