This was a really impressive first novel, and it read much quicker than its dense prose and long chapters led me to expect. It also had the merit of being the first modern literary work I've read where the failure to use quotation marks (seriously, though, what is up with that?) had an actual narrative purpose. It was the most "meta" novel I've read in years, constantly questioning itself and twisting the narration, but it had a lot of first-novel problems, too. I only understood why the narrators had been investment bankers after I read the author's biography at the end (he'd been one, of course), and the frigid English lady likely stood for someone he knew or loved, but that relationship never made much sense except as a really obvious metaphor.