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Replay is a slow novel, no way around that.
Grimwood’s character starts out as a hard to like, self-possessed, verging on hypocritical type of person who’s only initial claim to idealism, after being reborn with a perfect memory of what will happen in his life, is to try and prevent the assassination of J.F.K. in a vain hope that this could stop the Vietnam war from escalation. But Grimwood manages to transform his lead to the better from replay to replay, although his fifties/sixties upbringing, and the at times narrow morals that go along with it, are something he can never fully shake off and frankly more than once made me long to hit him over the head with a shovel.

There are times I would have wished that Grimwood was a more experienced writer, where I yearned for less tell and more show to the story, where I simply would have longed to get a better look at the characters changing emotional state instead of just being told “This is how he feels now, you just have to trust me on that�, and yet one has to admire the perfection with which he executed it all, how he manages to pick up the story again and again, with each new replay keeping you hooked to the very end.
What Grimwood lacks here in technical perfection when it comes to storytelling he more than makes up for in plot construction. He lets his character grow in perfect synchrony to the reader, there’s a clever intellect at work that anticipates arising questions and so creates a tale in which both reader and novel character together look at this mystery and try to unravel it, to make sense of what’s happening.

In this manner Grimwood builds up tier by tier a tale that takes a close look at all the burning questions that can drive around a man in his forties, it’s the perfect mid-life crisis novel one feels tempted to say.