This novel has a hazy quality from start to finish. Well, that’s not quite true. The beginning of the book has a startling turn when Liam, the main concern, loses his job, moves into a new apartment, and wakes up the next morning in the hospital, having been bashed in the head by an unknown intruder. Promising, one thinks. Liam has no memory of the attack. He obsesses about that. Then the novel heads out to sea and meanders from island to island. We meet Liam’s messy family, none of whom appear to have any feeling for each other. We learn that Liam has barely inhabited his own life. He has a grandchild for whom he has no feeling, a daughter whom he abandoned to live with her stepmother, a sister who barks orders at him; worse, he has a hollow core that is partly his own and partly Tyler’s, who writes him as though he has never had an emotion. There follows an encounter with Eunice, who is a rememberer for an elderly businessman, tailing him and keeping notes on what he needs to know about wherever he is. This is an interesting idea that goes nowhere (one of the islands referred to above). There is a romance between Eunice and Liam but it communicates little feeling to the work. There is his daughter Kitty who comes to live with him and provides a certain degree of connection. At the end there is an attempt to awaken Liam to the possibilities of the family he has kept at a distance. The end circles back to the attack that begins the story, in a desultory scene that might have been a comic gem except that the writing is perfunctory and a bit exhausted. This is not strong Tyler. What the title means is anybody’s guess. There is nothing offensive in it and it’s a passable read, but there are worlds of better choices out there.