"If I was out in the world I could only be in one place with one sunset, but HERE I could skip from Provincetown to Santa Cruz to Alaska to India and follow the sun around the world......" -Brewster North
The novel is comic in parts (for example, the author's hilarious description of Brewster North's experiences in a Zen ashram in India) and tenderly tragic in other places--his mother's descent into madness and her subsequent suicide along with its effects on him. We feel the pathos right along with Brewster right as he experiences it in the novel.
Gray portrays a character who has an interesting and checkered life and we want to keep reading to find out what happens to him all the way to the end. The author also makes the book an easy read as he can tell a story well and make the experiences vivid for the reader in his descriptions and rendering of dialogue.
The only reason I don't give the book a 5-star rating is because it almost seeemed too cluttered with vignette after vignette of various travel and life experiences. Gray should have spent more time exploring the main theme of the novel--that it is impossible for the main character to really take a vacation from the complexities of his life even though he really wants to. And I think Gray drives this point home most effectively with Brewster's trip to India (I think the Mexico trip could have been condensed more with the focus centering on the fact that the trip is when he learned of his mother's suicide. He could have left the other events of that trip out.) Gray should also have spent more time exploring the impact of the mother's suicide on the main character as that seems to be at the center of Brewster's thoughts in the novel--trying to work out the implications of his relationship with his mother in his life over time, particularly after she dies.