The Unknown Knowns

For the first hundred pages or so, I found this book to be inexplicably charming and laugh-out-loud funny. Poor delusional, maladjusted Jim is sweet in his own pathetically disengaged way. He's a gawky comic book nerd raised to be hyper-femininely aware, and the fantasy of Nautika becomes a bizarre marriage of the two viewpoints. The introduction of the character of Agent Les Diaz, though, takes what could have been an interestingly witty examination of one man's obsession, and twists it, through the introduction of a watered-down (plenty of pun intended) satirical look at governmental incompetency and idiocy, into a stand off between two delusional individuals, one looking far too hard to find a terrorist plot, and another looking far too hard to find proof for his own creation myth's creations.

This devolved into a trying work, disappointing because the first pages held such promise of insight.