“What if Forrest Gump were very smart… and an artist?” seems to be the question posed by this book, which is ultimately a series of character sketches that doesn’t quite work as a novel. In the first 1/3 of the book, I was hooked — I really enjoyed the alternate America the author describes, and the protagonist’s journey to learn about her wife’s past. But then it simply went on too long, with an endless parade of characters describing their relationship with X as a different person, and I stopped thinking that any one new character added anything to the story. It comes around towards the end, to the idea that we all inhabit multiple characters as we move through life, even if we don’t recognize it as such. If there is a point to the novel, I think it’s that “X” is a placeholder for whoever in the reader’s past continues to control their life in the present, becoming mythic in their absence, and to invite reflection on who that person might be.