Michael Brodsky’s novel charts that most basic and reluctant of all quests, the quest for self. One man’s apparent willingness to retrieve another—the estranged son of a doomed businessman—becomes the occasion for an exploration of story-telling and, just as important, what gets in the way of story-telling. Feeding and feeding off the protagonist’s other ordeals—social, economic, sexual, existential, is the struggle to live his story and be its narrator. A winding narrative peppered with anecdotes that may or may not be crucial to the fabric of the story, Dyad anatomizes the detective genre, subjecting its everyday world gone haywire to obsessive scrutiny. The result is some of the most intricate American fiction being written today.