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This is a good book. It's rare -- a provocative book that raises serious questions but is very entertaining, and even a fast read.

Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. He's an excellent writer who writes almost breezily about serious subjects. Here the subject is self-absorption, conscience, guilt, and redemption. The lead character is Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell. If that sounds odd, it's representative of how Butler treats life in Hell. It's not just pools of molten sulfur (although it sometimes is) so much as a depressing version of ordinary life, with seemingly everyone who ever lived on Earth gathered to suffer together. At one point, Hatcher and one of his ex-wives sit reflecting on their lives together on Earth and in Hell:

Hatcher thinks: We only hurt each other. "Why are we here?" he says, softly.
"We were always here," she says.

That is the question that Hatcher poses to his on-air interview subjects, including J. Edgar Hoover, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, and even Satan himself -- "Why do you think you're here?" Each, with the exception of Satan, answers with some account of what they have done to deserve being in Hell. But another way to take the question, especially given how much Hell resembles ordinary life, is, "What is my purpose in Hell?" or "What am I here in Hell to do?" That would seem an especially poignant question, given that you will be there forever.

Hatcher is there to escape. Everyone wants to escape from Hell. And Hatcher comes to believe that escape is possible.

The question is what escape would mean. Everyone is in Hell, suffering all together. Where else is there to go? Who would be there? What would Heaven be?