Barry Smolin

The final installment in Barry Smolin's trilogy The Miranda Complex finds Lance Atlas, as he has been all along, splayed on the grass at the La Brea Tar Pits, summer of '79, in the aftermath of the previous night's party where he encountered Miranda Savitch for the first time since graduation. In this volume, centered mainly in 1977 & 1978, Lance tries to remember what he spent the night before remembering, something about a Grateful Dead show at the Shrine Auditorium, his friend's marriage to their teacher, AP English class, an unusual dinner party, heart troubles, the prom, and, of course, the ongoing bundle of torn attentions that makes him so confusing to the human female. When the saga comes to a close, Lance is finally utterly present just as the story catches up with itself. The rest is now.

He can't remember his own name. Along the banks of the river Wye, mistaken for, alternately, Peter Pan and someone's father, he ponders the water, talks to a girl named Wendy, tries to remember what dreams may have come, loses all hunger, watches infomercials, occasionally considers changing his clothes, reads Finnegans Wake, pretends to have read Gravity's Rainbow, all the while nagged by the sensation that he's really somewhere else.