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Saturday, 26 November 2005 09:53

BENJAMIN KUNKEL: INDECISION (Random House; 241 pgs; $21.95)

Here’s an underwhelming, press-gathering novel from a founding editor of n + 1, a new press-gathering journal of literature, politics, and culture. Twenty-eight-year-old narrator Dwight Wilmerding works in tech support for Pfizer, and he’s credible—and at certain moments even lovable—as the wiseguy underachiever who’s privately taken with his public unimpressiveness. Kunkel gives him an initially interesting problem (“chronic indecision”) and a few sharp insights (“Here in New York I have been mistaking the commotion for my own”), but lays a track for the story that rarely feels worth taking. There’s a new experimental drug promising “ironclad resolutions,” a global and sincere search for love, and half-hearted nods to incest and suicide. By the novel’s end—with a predictable revelation about the drug, a high school reunion speech, and a joke about Canadian pronunciation—it was clear that Kunkel had lost his shot at saving the story. Indecision is clever but without much matter, like the “fond and useless ‘Adiós’” Dwight sends to someone—a character who could’ve been a reader—passing momentarily through his world.