Let me admit first that I was never particularly engaged by this book. I read it in small chunks, mainly while sitting in bed preparing to fall asleep. From that perspective, the disjoint narrative of Whitehead's book was not a good impedance match to my available attention span. I'm not even certain as I write this that I could reconstruct all of the important plot elements. What I got from the novel instead was a strong sense of place — of a sterile urban environment in some vague dystopia — and a relatively weak sense of character. Whitehead's sentence-level writing is clever but doesn't flow well. He's full of good ideas, but doesn't work hard enough to make his writing lucid. This is probably a better book than I'm giving it credit for, but I'm not that impressed.