Abandoned and forsaken.I tried going back to reading this today. It made me feel worse than I had remembered.This is a book that is more an infection than a novel. And keeping with the themes of the book, we will say an STD in written form.The characters are just awful and seem to have nothing to live for, and thus go on and on and on about things they wish mattered to them. I can see that at one point in time this would have been a book I enjoyed from a watching people be miserable and fall further into despair. So what I can thank this book for is that I now know I am no longer the kind of guy who gets off on this. Dreary, uninspiring fiction, please kindly find someone else to glimmer upon.