
Busy Monsters by William Giraldi
Charles Homar, the hero of William Giraldi’s novel, is a middling memoirist of minor acclaim and a columnist for a popular glossy magazine called New Nation Weekly. Four times a month, this esteemed periodical pays Homar to recount, in majestically baroque language, the various travails that God hath inflicted upon Charles Homar, which include a perpetually dyspeptic father and a stubborn squirrel infestation in his suburban New England home. New Nation Weekly, of course, is a fiction, as is the conceit that any publication would employ Homar to fill its pages. He’s a dolt, this guy, self-centered