It's like watching a billiard game - Tarloff racks the object balls - stripes for males, solids for females and then the cue ball strikes and they ricochet off one another again and again across a tabula rasa version of Berkeley then and now.

University life itself and high tech are sort of like elephants in the room but maybe that's impossible to escape in a setting like contemporary Berkeley ? They are there in a space of absence (there be dragons?) bordered by the streets and parking lots used by the characters but overwhelmed by a focus on a different past than the one of the cyclotron.


The interior lives of the characters and multiple narrative voices create a cohesive story that could be a maudlin wallow in nostalgia in other hands but ultimately steers clear.

The women, like Tarloff's Berkeley, become known to us primarily through the protagonist - we know their story and the way we read them is not the only story of their lives - hopefully? Thankfully? The criticisms leveled at them are unrelenting while at the same time it's clear this is a story of a life chaptered by the milestones of couplehood, loss and love.