It's unclear whether everything is occurring in the mind of the apparent protagonist, Chaos/ Everett/Moon, or perhaps in the mind of a psychically domineering fat man, an almost archetypal messianic dreamer called Kellogg, who projects dreams that appear to control everybody else. It's ironic that everywhere the environment is so precisely portrayed, yet somehow the novel suggests that all is solipsism. 'A gestalt urge for coherence, after the rupture.' 'In America everybody's already wandering around lost.

'What did his attachment to Cale and Gwen mean if he could barely remember them? Who was he, if all he knew of himself was the shreds of memory that clung to these people?' Anyway, he'd learned by now to distrust dreams and memories both. 'The dreams seemed designed, either by the computer or by some part of his sleeping self, to nudge him towards speculations about his life before.they confused him.He suspected that some of it was just dreams, not actual memories. 'You know, the weirdness came out, that's all. I'm sure you've noticed how local things can get nowadays.' 'Basically a lot of the old connections between things fell away, which gave people a chance to make up new ones. The narrative commences in the desert of Wyoming in the small town of Hatfork, and heads west on a road trip, through another green world, via conformist government-run Vacaville, until it finally reaches the weird scenes of San Francisco (including the best party scene in fiction since William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon): And with the most comforting explanation for the disaster.' They are the ones with a certain fixity of vision. 'As in previous eras, the leaders are not necessarily those who are wisest or strongest. 'Living under the regime of an eccentric dreamer may be better than suffering through the disjointed, amnesiac period that followed the disaster.' 'I've been getting these dreams ever since the break.' But there's no agreement on what it was.' A break? Perhaps, a bomb? An alien invasion? Nobody seems to know.

This time, it's a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Once again, Jonathan Lethem uses genre to explore and test his talent for world-building, narrative construction and dialogue. The Fat Man in (at the End of) Post-History

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