Turns out the thirty year old Eggleston photo on the cover was my favorite thing about this book. Smith can certainly turn out some lovely prose, and couple it with unique approaches to fictional perspective, maybe along the lines of Virginia Woolf's flowery poeticism and narrative experiments. And there are plenty of interesting pieces of the puzzle here (I feel OK using this cliché since one of the book's characters is obsessed with the idea of clichéd language), but they never congeal into anything very satisfying, and the resolutions reached by her characters don't really feel earned. To use another cliché: this book's whole is less than the sum of its parts. Or something. It's a very showy kind of book, but I couldn't help feeling, upon finishing it, that all of its eloquence was a little shallow. Still, it earns an extra star in the rating because it can be a very pretty read.