Oval is a blistering diagnosis of how today’s social structures have shaped us. Western capitalism has generated a state of benevolent-seeming dysfunction, and Wilk is astute at rendering the social comedy of our malaise. But the book’s real drama unfolds on a more complex interior plane. At the outset, Louis has just returned from his mother’s funeral, and he’s acting “so unthinkably normal that it was surely an abnormality.”

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