I love this book. I adore Harry March but I completely understand why his wife left him. The stunt at the Bitterman's dinner party was so Harry. The story is rather slow moving (like Harry) but with Hector's droll comments it doesn't bog down. Harry's unbridled hatred of would-be writers, vanity-driven and self-absorbed modern civilization and especially Lapham make for an entertaining and rewarding read. It's a short read and it ended before I was ready to stop reading Harry's mind.

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Harry March is quite mad. He was once a brilliant, best-selling writer, but now he does little but watch Murder She Wrote reruns all day and hold two-way conversations with his dog Hector. Harry is a recluse who lives in a small house on a tiny secluded island in a river in the Hamptons, avoids other people whenever possible, and keeps his life's savings piled on the floor of a spare room, not knowing how much is there and seldom spending any of it. Harry was happy with his life until ten months ago when Lapham, a pretentious multimillionaire, started to build an ostentatious mega-mansion near Harry's island, effectively destroying Harry's idyllic seclusion. "Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang!" go the workmen's hammers. The real world is knocking, and Harry must do something to make it go away.

This scenerio, of course, could be the stuff of a horrific tragedy; instead, Rosenblatt has given us a wonderfully witty satire on pretentions and materialism, and to some degree on the pretensions of the anti-pretentious. This is a funny, funny book. It is one that I would gladly display in a prominent place in the library of Castle Pseudonymous, my summer cottage, if I could only find an exorbitantly expensive, signed, hand-illuminated first edition in gilt-edged Tibetan yakskin vellum.

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