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Someone once said that the problem with sensational journalism is not that it is not journalism, but rather that it is not sensational. Reading through this book, I thought of a new way of phrasing the idea: the problem with experimental novelists is not that they are not novelists, but that they are not experimental.

This could have been a truly imaginative piece of work. When I picked it up, I was looking forward to all the grossness, horror, and enslavement of Dante's Inferno, but updated with the hammer of our new modern sensibilities, wherein we don't shrink away from any subject, no matter how graphic. Also, I was expecting the cold chill that comes from watching a good horror movie, a chill which, I am convinced, comes from the idea of the self being erased. Fitting subjects for a modern reworking of hell, no?

True, there are people getting eaten with acid. But they reconstitute themselves afterward. There are people getting shot. They heal themselves afterward. There are jokes. For example, did you know that George W. Bush is really stupid? That Bill Clinton likes to have sex with loose women? And that Jerry Seinfeld tells lots of jokes about ordinary things? Ha ha! It is all so fucking inventive.

Being a modern writer with modern sensibilities, Mr. Butler cannot seem to imagine anything worse than getting hurt, getting embarrassed, or not being able to have sex. In other words, not getting what you want is hell.

Furthermore since, as Bob Dylan said in the excellent song "To Ramona," "you're better than no one and no one is better than you," everyone is in hell, from Moses to Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa is, I think, forced to be a cocktail waitress. Isn't that funny?

Mr. Butler, realizing at some point that he can't construct an entire book out of commonplace observations that everybody already knows, has filled in the space between these observations with a plot about a newscaster trying to discover a way out of hell. Of course, when he discovers this way out, it only turns out to be a gateway to some place (Heaven) where no one is trying to hurt you all the time.

Again, nothing really profound, as this subject matter would tend to make one expect. No reaching. The conclusion of the book has the character of being drawn out of a hat: it is random and just strange enough to make you think you've missed something very important within all the text.

Having perhaps read my hundredth book by a modern writer that I didn't understand, I am beginning to lose a little of my patience with these endings that are designed to make you believe that there is something deep in the book that you've missed. Still, I will state my ever-recurring caveat: this book may well have interesting things in it, and I may be a poor enough reader not to understand those things.

Having said that, I can't help but wonder if this ending business (wherein the ending is strange enough to attempt to inform the middle and beginning of the text you've already read) hasn't just become part of every modern writer's toolbox. In my view, the master of this technique was Hemingway, and it always worked well for him because his writing style deliberately left so many of the big issues out.

Incidentally, I think Hemingway stole the technique from Chekhov, who seems to use it again and again ad nauseum in his many tedious stories about boring people in the Russian countryside. Thanks, Chekhov, for inventing modern literature!

Seriously, though, it occurs to me that this technique is actually older than Chekhov, much older. The last chapter of The Iliad is very beautifully devoted to the funeral of Hector, when all along you thought the book was supposed to be about Achilles and his gang. In fact, in my first year of college I was so moved by the end of the Iliad that I was forced to cut the last line out of my copy and tape it to my door: "Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses."

The difference, of course, is that what Homer does is to inform us of another level running like bedrock beneath a story already chock full of levels, while Chekhov informs us that, though we thought we had been reading about nothing, in fact we have been reading something very deep and profound and we are just to stupid to understand it. It is clear to me, anyway, who is the better writer.

Anyway, the ending to Mr. Butler's novel has this kind of feel. It seems to inform the work, though in what way, I do not know, and I certainly don't feel driven by the originality of the work to sit down and try to dig it out. If, in fact, it is there.