The writing in this book is, for the most part, wonderful. It was the great writing--evocative descriptions of relationships and actions--that saved this story for me from being awful. In its essence, the plot is predictable and depressing (it's nice when a book lets it characters have even one or two positive moments, which this book did not). The plot synopsis is fairly simple: a famed (at least in his home town) author commits a murder-suicide, and that sets the narrator into a deep downward spiral. My real problem with the book is that at the end, the narrator has apparently learned nothing; if I have to read about the guy's spiral into misery, it'd be nice to have him at least grow a little from it. The writing is willing, but the story is weak.