Fiction. I read the book as soon as I got back from Vegas. Then I read it again. His four leading men were Jews stumbling through late middle age, New Yorkers who despise and love each other in about equal measure. They were, as a group, stunned before their own capacities for trouble--schmendricks who fail ecstatically. Most remarkable were Camoin's sentences, which bristled with the supple dynamism of Bellow, the jazzy patter of Elkin--Steve Almond.