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I was charmed into reading this novel by its first pages, in which a self-sabotaging former ad exec revels in the slushy city beauty of a Minnesota December as he trudges to his weekly group therapy appointment: "These perforations of the self were more important to us than they were to most people.... We loved the world because it was not us." The story that follows—of failure, friendship, and slow-won personal growth—keeps to the promise of that ramshackle charm, most winningly when Duane, its ad-man semi-hero, is waxing eloquent about his lifelong love for the commercial craft—not the art—of graphic design, of the satisfaction of making a witty, beautiful thing in the midst of a "half-assed, first draft, mumbling, misunderstood, shy, staticky, and often stupid world."