Robert Lukens

And that, to me, it's at the absolute centre of this story.

And to me, it's also at the centre of the difficulties of this as a novel and the difficulties of this in how it can deal with the subjects we were just talking about.

Because to me, the comedy...

It essentially is a comedic novel to me.

It's a road trip comedy, almost a slapstick American college kind of road trip story.

And I can see eyes widening as I'm talking about this.

My eyebrows.

Absolutely.

And we'll get onto it, but that's...

It's a comedic novel to me that travels through these other episodes.

And that to me is an incredible task that Dan has taken on to combine those, what you would suspect to be disparate elements into a story.

And to me, that's where the trouble starts.

All the time.

And it's interesting that you say that.

It's one of these things and it points to me that the comedy is such a part of this book.

And as we all know with comedy, one person's bread is not the other's butter, to coin a bad phrase.

To me, so much of the comedy of the story is isolated in those dialogue sections, especially between Carl and Baz.

They're essentially almost observational comedy riffs on various oddities of daily life.

So we get...

sections on isn't it funny about disposable razor companies keep putting more blades on the razors and and to me some pretty awkward sections there's quite a long dialogue section about whether it is or isn't gay to like scented candles what's the answer