The perfect order of things

"By turns comic and moving, [the author] revisits the terrible hurt of a first love, a friend's bizarre dissembling, an island paradise turned strangely grotesque. From a life shaped by Tolstoy, the Beatles, the cult of celebrity, the delusion of drugs, and the vagaries of the literary life, [this novel] presents a dazzling cavalcade of stories that punctuate a life passionately lived and loved"--Jacket.