worth a look?

[Albert Rolls]

In a feisty essay on fiction's future, Zadie Smith admits that she has loved and written novels built around lyrical realism - even as she suggests that their authors have been less true to contemporary life than thornier outliers like Pynchon, Wallace and Tom McCarthy, each trying to "shake the novel out of its present complacency."

She's right, and in an age when publishers and readers are increasingly unwilling to take chances, that spells potential trouble for "Luminarium," Alex Shakar's monumentally ambitious and demanding new novel.

Daring to fail, it frequently stumbles. Insisting its readers work, it occasionally left this one exhausted as well as lost; to steal one of Shakar's hundreds of Pynchonesque similes, there were times I felt like I was "flicking a Zippo inside the sun."