The gimmick/gag didn't really work for me. I think reading this in one sitting is vital to enjoying this book.

Moments of greatness, but I think it ended up less than the sum of its parts. ( )

The form of this novel---a footnote-heavy deep dive into one young man's trip up an escalator at the end of his lunch break---could have been clunky, but I actually found it fairly smooth reading. Maybe the narrator has an anxiety disorder or is just very particular, but either way I enjoyed the way his personality is revealed bit by bit through his interior monologue. I love his rant about people who stand still on escalators. ( )

> Cars and trucks around mine were all nicely spaced: close enough to create a sense of fellowship and shared purpose, but not close enough to make you think that you couldn't swerve exuberantly into another lane at any time if you wanted.

> At the time I was riding the escalator to the mezzanine every day I didn't own a car, but later, when I did, I realized that escalatorial happiness is not too far removed from the standard pleasure that the highway commuter feels driving his warm, quiet box between pulsing intermittencies of white road paint at a steady speed.

> Here was where I made a discovery. An image came to me— Ingres's portrait of Napoleon. Displacing my tie, I undid a single middle button. Yes, it was possible to get at your underarm by entering the shirt through the gap made by one undone button and then working the stick of antiperspirant up the pleural cavity between T-shirt and shirt until you were able to snag the sleevelet of the T-shirt with a finger and pull it past the seam where your shirtsleeve began, thereby exposing the area you needed to cover. I felt like Balboa or Copernicus.

> Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber. Yet do we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are festschrift volumes published honoring the dead greats in the field? People watch the news every night like robots, thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the "Please Return This Portion" edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging file-folder labels. The lines dividing one year from another in your past are perforated, and the mental sensation of detaching a period of your life for closer scrutiny resembles the reluctant guided tearing of a perforated seam. ( )

A delight. Funny, enlightening and familiar in many ways. ( )

What virtually ever other first person novel has tried (and failed) to do. Genius. ( )