My interest piqued by Amazon.com's algorithms and Rock Show Girl's recommendation, I finally read Cloud Atlas, which was pretty good, totally up the alley of Chabon fans and all (light-seeming writing, a plot with tasteful loose ends, a few poignant moments like half-buried artifacts), and thanks mostly to the "daring artistry" [sic] of the split-story structure, and some details easily added after the fact, Cloud Atlas is powerful in its current form, more powerful than your usual collection of short stories.

(That is, as long as you can remember everything that happened a few hundred pages ago: I'll admit to paging back. The structure builds tension, but that tension is reliant upon our memory of the various dropped plotlines.)

And yet... Our Bold Hero feels a bit manipulated.

Prophylactic self-deprecation, a sort of knowier-than-thou irony, and a love of interpretation-attracting vacuums: these are the hallmarks of the so-called post-postmodernists. Often it seems that novels like these, though they can still be great to read, aren't so much concerned with being "enjoyable" or "good" as they are with being immune to criticism.

At the risk of sounding very dense: I like this book, but how much of that is because I can't find a way to dislike it, not without losing some imaginary contest with the author?

The book's hidden gem: two chapters called "An Orison of Sonmi-451," which if reassembled could be an excellent stand-alone short story about a Korean neocapitalist dystopia. The satire was delicious, by the way, doing a much better job than Jennifer Government and covering prettymuch the same ground. Anyone who liked Snow Crash and Brave New World should check this book out for a few days and skip right to page 183.

The unbroken story in between, heavily influenced, one assumes, by Riddley Walker, is less good but also worth reading.