Bought in 1981, as per my inscription, perhaps not read since, and from the start I know why. It's relentlessly external and not quite picaresque, the reverse of an adventure: Mr Twombly, Dick, leaves Cynthia, his tortoise and Kate his daughter and her family and the home they put him in, for a life on the road, towards Phoenix Arizona, with Ed Behemoth, ex-pugilist. The best thing is that they fetch up in the hotel of an abandoned town a hundred miles from Phoenix. They'll set up the hotel again, shelter other vagrants like their younger selves.
I'd rather watch a movie, find myself in a recently abandoned hotel; this isn't reading, it's cantering through a semi-peopled landscape. That's why the hotel is a relief.
