Goddamn. Okay, first - there is a plot here, and you'll see it as you work through our Midwestern-by-transfer Molly Bloom's psychoses and obsessions. But just like "Ulysses" (God, what a comparison), you're getting into the absoluteness of a single life. Tons of references, foibles, worries, obsessions, and ennuis that wouldn't make a lick of sense to anybody who isn't her - and that's the point. You're not supposed to get it all, other than the deep stress of mere existence in 2019 Ameri[c/k]a.

So, at 700 pages in, it clicked. Yeah there's an undercurrent of suburban angst through this, but as it progresses I realize it's much more than that. It's the kind of excoriation of the destruction of civilization and settlement, especially the myths that we tell ourselves as Americans both the topical one of our "taming of the land", but also the deeper myth that we can live sustainably. And we can't! We've destroyed it. Our backyards and homes are ecological wastelands with sterile lawns. Did you know there used to be buffalo in Ohio until the early 1830s? Now it's parking lots everywhere, and it's called a triumph of humanity.

In this book, there's a story about a mountain lion and her cubs on the edge of humanity - in the beginning, it's unclear where she is as it sounds like it's on the savannah, but she interacts with humans more and more until her cubs are taken from her by "do-gooders" who think they're lost kittens. This tension on the edge of nature and humanity - really a destroyed nature with a lion so desperate to say the land is still hers - becomes the undercurrent of our Ohio housewife's monologue, where everything she feels and says has the undercurrent of a painful awareness that this land is a lie, it was built on lies, and her fears and worries are reflective of the more insidious alienation that is at the very heart of the American Myth.

All because I said I liked "Satantango" earlier this year and one of my buddies was like "hey so there's this book on ducks you might want to check out..."