DeWitt's cleverness jumps from the pages in this one--at least when its her words you're reading. Every one of her literary acrobatic tricks seems to end in a soft landing, and her propulsive didacticism constantly interpolates the student-teacher gap with ebeam precision. Gridneff on the other hand feels set up to be something of a lolcow; the chosen loser in a kayfabe headliner. It doesn't compromise the book necessarily, but his writing didn't do much for me. Narratively the book is suprisingly normal (at least relative to expectations), more quantitatively different than qualitatively diffent to other novels of its pomo ilk. The book never seems to come together and achieve whatever transformation or denouement one might expect, and arguably that's the point, but even attempting to reason from an abstract, metafictional vantage something still feels lacking. Maybe it's a skill issue, but while I found it a fun read--and it is brilliant in many of its constituent parts--as a novel (as is heavily lamp-shaded by the book) it didn't quite succeed for me.