Kindle. Unferth's first novel. It's a bit underbaked: a bloke chases another bloke from NYC to Syracuse, NY and then to Nicaragua on the very thin premise that the latter is somehow involved with the former's wife. There's a sideline in dolphin untraining (reconditioning for release into the wild) that prefigures the concerns of her later works. Very occasionally she comes out with a great line but the bulk is a lot of foreshadowing and circling the drain. By the two-thirds mark it's clear there's not going to be a payoff that makes slogging through all the mystifying, fragmentary setup worthwhile.
Madison Smartt Bell at the New York Times: the characters are so abstract that the contrivances are assets. Unferth's take on human connection is bleak. Goodreads.
