APPROXIMATELY HEAVEN

Debut about a man’s wanderings in the wake of a failed marriage.

“But in the nonmedical sense depression means, for me anyway, having the feeling that something you deserve has been taken away from you.” Don’s wife, Mary, wants to leave him because they have a crappy house and it doesn’t look like they’ll ever make a decent home together. Don convinces her to stay while he leaves himself to wander around his hometown for a bit, messing with the likes of Walter and Dove, good old boys who paint trucks with sparkly bicycle paint. Still in love with Mary, Don nevertheless decides to go on a journey with Dove to Mississippi—the two have adventures with dead opossums, pirate ships, casinos, lesbian erotica, and they have accidental conversations on whether they or anyone they know has a soul. They work out bits of nagging rhetoric: “Should I make a new rule not to ever drive when I’m drinking? Everyone knows it’s not good. But on the other hand, how would I get places if I didn’t drive?” Wharton seems to be shooting for the zany southern minimalism of an old instructor: Frederick Barthelme. But while comic in spots and sad in others, he has yet to master that most specialized of subgenres. The nonsequential here that is meant to simulate a world of similarly fractured narrative seems just as often disorganized, and we’re never sure why Don or we have been dragged along on this adventure. In the end, even if Don saves his wife but loses his house, the message fails to jibe convincingly with its own anti-meaning: “But if almost making you was not enough, and you aren’t quite fully real, then my fondness for you is also not real. Or else it is a joke, which makes me a joke as well.”

A talent whose best work lies ahead.