D-Tours

A dying woman, the love of his life, awaits Max, the narrator-hero, in his hotel room while he finds his way back, caught like a sleepwalker in a succession of daunting adventures, contending with, in part, vampires, spies, serial killers, femmes fatales, alien worlds, giant apes and mad scientists, all the time awaiting the return of his absent memory. D-Toursis probably not on your itinerary; it is the evasive side-step you take that gets you everywhere. It is the private tour of America you take each night that you never quite shake yourself awake from to remember. Jonathan Baumbach's wild ride of a novel is a satire and celebration of movie narratives, running them one after another, one into another like fairy tales or cultural jetsam or primal dreams. In another sense, D-Toursis a kind of 1001 Nights at the Drive-in. And you are there with the narrator-hero, like Scheherazade telling your story in every imaginable variation, because your very survival depends on reinventing the world.