Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

Another in my National Book Award reading project; this one was a finalist. It's another of those novels plagued with uninteresting or annoying characters and an unsatisfying ending. There's too much drug usage and navel gazing by the characters for me to identify with them. Wasted lives, a lot like the novel "Holy Skirts". The character of the fifteen-year-old son is irritating and overdone, and he is, of course, very important to the book. That's one of the problems with literary fiction - the novels depend so much on character, since plot is ignored or abandoned. If your characters are not likable for a particular reader, then your novel suffers.