Plus One

So, I finished Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi yesterday afternoon always plum to finish two books in the same day, except it wasn't. There was lack, a loss, most likely intentional in the second half of Geoff Dyer's novel. The set piece in India bothered me a smuch as I found the opening section, rife with posturing, as hilarious as anything I've read recently. In fact, I wanted to label (given that I have to classify or associate, how else could I make sense of this?) it as a slacker, raver Joanthan Coe. I noted to my wife that the book was adorned with blurbs from William Boyd, David Mitchell and Zadie Smith. She asked if they saw themselves as shallow as Jeff, the protagonist of the first and , possibly, the concluding sections of the novel. .