Like Binx Bolling in Percy's The Moviegoer, but at a much higher pitch of talkative despair, Chaim Herzog is a man on a philosophical quest. "Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas," he tells us. "I even know which ones." But unlike Bolling he is in the grip of a crisis that's not merely existential. His wife has left him for somebody he thought was a good friend, taking with her his beloved daughter. This plunges him into a tormented appraisal not only of himself and the people around him, but of nearly everything that has transpired since the Age of Reason got under way. You get to watch him shake his head, and sometimes his fist, at the world, all the while asking it, unbreak my heart.—R.L.