The Long Shoe

Main character Matt Giles is at a crossroads in his sorry little life. He’s been fired from his job as a bathroom furniture salesman. His girlfriend Harriet, a hardworking prosecutor, has vanished with a note that paraphrases down to “I need to think about us”, and the two most significant relationships left in his life are with his cat and his manipulative neighbor Carol.

When he’s offered a strange job at luxury apartments Satsuma Heights, keeping tabs on the other residents in exchange for a place to live, he doesn’t have enough resistance in him to say no. Matt sinks into a world of “quirky” furnishings, interlocked surveillance, and various charismatics weirdos.

The story is moderately funny in an ambling way, but Matt is such a dishrag of a narrator in his absolute aversion to conflict that I became adverse to spending time with him. This is the very ideal of beach reading, a second-screen book that flees the memory as soon as its read.