An eerie fantasy, this novel is a perfect example of the modernist avant-garde as a novel. I would say the novel itself is a circus just as much as the circus inside of the novel itself. The off-putting characters (Dr. Matthew O’Connor with his rusty speculum), the dream-like sequences (are you looking in on a Freudian psychoanalytic session?), the highly poetic language, and the fantastic events (women acting like dogs) make it an unforgettable reading experience. As an expatriate novel, it boasts deracine characters out of their native elements walking the streets of major metropolitan areas, finding new ways to locate identity, but not in any sense that would be recognizable to Dickens or Fielding. Despite its array of themes congenial to modernism (religion, sexuality, gender, identity, Jewishness, exile, loneliness, anguished love), it does not seem to coalesce into an organic whole like other modernist novels do (cf Dalloway).