You Were Wrong

The details of protagonist Karl Floor’s sad life are dispatched with heartless economy in this novel’s opening salvo: “Father dead, mother dead, stepfather sick and mean, siblings none, friends none.” Penned up in a Long Island house with his malevolent stepfather and his dead mother’s memory, the twentysomething math teacher is rotting on the vine when a mysterious girl appears in his upstairs hallway. Sylvia is one of a band of squatters living off the largesse of her lover, a malicious real-estate mogul with intimidatingly good hair. Fresh off a seemingly random beating by two of his students, Karl is ripe for manipulation, and she pulls him easily into her orbit, a tangle of family relations and real-estate debt.

Sharpe’s fluid, grimly comic prose expresses both effortless sadism and thwarted goodness with an ease that distracts from his knotty narrative’s overreliance on coincidence. But while an “everything is connected” logic makes for some unlikely tying off of loose ends, it is Karl’s baffled navigation of human contact that truly propels the story. Watching the interactions of the people around him, he wonders “how many of his misapprehensions of the world the world had the patience and resources to correct.” This inability to read social cues makes his attempts to decipher the motives of others into a soundtrack that grounds the plot.

Yet the plot remains muddy, its twists barely delineated. The sense of unease that permeates the book crackles periodically into violent episodes that are puzzlingly consequence-free, robbing its final bloodletting of any broader context. Just as Karl’s chronic misconceptions bleed unchecked into his pitiful reality, this book’s navel-gazing tendencies make even big events feel like treading water.

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