“All That Man Is” takes the novel form and shakes out of it a few essential seeds. It tells not one long story but nine shortish tales, each about a different man. These stories are not without plot, but they don’t have much in the way of conventional fictional shaping; each seizes on a moment of crisis in a man’s life and quickly dramatizes it. The entire book is narrated in an urgent, poking present tense, and the pithed characters, of different ages, are presented without complex histories—indeed, without much history at all. There are a few light links between the chapters, but these connections are not especially persuasive or meaningful. Szalay says that each chapter, released into community with its fellows, is not expected to carry “its own solitary burden of meaning.” The stories are “points on an arc rather than being arcs themselves.” The effect is something like emergency writing for our times: intense, direct, daring, and also somewhat limited and repetitive. The men’s slightly different crises are united in being crises.

I'll write up a few sentences on why I recommend it when I get to a computer later this afternoon.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3376506&forum_id=2#31654969)

Third story is among the strongest, though

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3376506&forum_id=2#31732581)