The book haunted me for several days. I found myself wondering how the Deans would view this situation, or that news story. How might they respond? I tried to think like a Dean, as useless as their thinking turned out to be.

I will wait with some interest to see if Steve Toltz can capture lightning in a bottle twice. His first book could be his best, a feat never to be repeated. That would make it a masterwork. It could be just the first in a series of mammoth volumes, each peeling back layers of the society in which we live, showing us absurdity from the inside, skewering us from the viewpoints of a series of odd characters. I hope there is more where A Fraction of the Whole came from, because even with more than 500 pages, I found myself wanting to keep reading, to know more of life from within the skewed minds of the Deans.