What with all the nods, winks, elbow nudges, smirks and capers apparently on display in "Icelander", Miller's review already makes me desperate for the kind of poker-faced literary workmanship that counter-sinks the nails properly (nail heads flush with the surface) and worries the finish to a gleam. The brutal truth is it's easier to write broad (laughing out loud to one's self as one sails along) than it is to write solid, and that's why broad keeps getting done these days (it could also be the Saturday morning cartoons we grew up with; when Chip's dad fell off the ocean liner in Franzen's "The Corrections", I thought: this guy has been watching too many Roadrunner cartoons).

Meanwhile, McSweeney's is the place I think of when I hear the word 'callow'. This is what happens when your battle cry is, 'At least people are reading.' Christ, Nabokov at his broadest would never have named a character 'MacGuffin'...he was author enough to let his characters take the heat for the worst lapses in taste and suavity in Nabokovland and generous enough to let his readers do a little work unpacking the jokes. And let's not forget that Nabokov's rococo style's chief alibi remains that people first read him when Edith Wharton still walked the earth. In short, Long has no such excuse.

Clumsy cutesy handlebar-mustache flourishes like referring to the protag as 'Our Heroine' inspires me to look for someone in the vicinity (with a five figure advance and an i-pod with some Henry Mancini on it, prolly) to slap. And with a name like Dustin...

Anyway, at least we can be sure that the hard cover edition of the book will look great in a Starbucks. I'll wait a week and buy it second hand.

Three posts in and already people have started shitting all over the review.

An amazing debut novel, I could read it again and again! Highly recommended.

A McSweeney's book with Iceland in the title, footnotes,and bumbling sidekicks? What a shock.

"At one point in Dustin Long's endearingly wacky puzzle novel, "Icelander," two "metaphysical detectives" discover a copy of "The Case of the Consternated Cossacks" on a bookshelf between Herman Melville's "The Confidence Man" and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Valley of Fear." Since this bumbling pair, a kind of existential Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, see everything as a clue, they have no doubt that the book's placement is significant, but as usual they just can't figure out what the significance is. At this juncture, the novel's "editor" intrudes. In a cranky footnote he observes that there would be equal meaning embedded in the fact that the books placed just above and under "The Case of the Consternated Cossacks" are by, say, Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Peters (who, to the uninitiated, writes mystery novels about a sleuthing female Egyptologist). You see, the books have been shelved by "the most ingenious library scientist of modern times," whose plan for a nonlinear "rhizomatic replacement of the Dewey Decimal System" entails sorting books without hierarchy, according to an "infinite skein of interconnections."

Wow. Maybe it's the early morning hour, maybe it's the fact that I'd just like to read a book about human beings–shit give me even a convincing goat character—rather than another foray into insignificant land with existential Rosencrantz & Guildensterns and a sleuthing female Egyptologist as my guides, but this paragraph completely exhausted my tolerance for reading on. Beautiful cover, though.