The author spins a great story into a bombastic moral lesson involving a wreck of a man hooked on drugs and alcohol, and his Russian friend, or was he Ukranian, hard to figure.
The tome, 700 plus pages, devotes at least half of the lumbering plot to chacter analysis of the two central figures.
Thank heavens for "speed reading".
On a scale of ten as the best, 6 or so dear reader.