It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.
This is an opening line that could take the reader in any one of an almost infinite number of possibilities. Depending upon the genre or lack thereof, this is the kind of opening line that creates its power by telling the reader nothing of specific. The mystery of what the “it” that begins in the usual way is cleared up immediately, however, as the very next sentence introduces the story’s primary protagonist, Sasha, as well as her peculiar peccadillo: stealing. By the end of the paragraph, a ton of specificity has been added, including the information that Sasha is currently seeing a therapist to deal with her stealing out of a compulsion rather than particularly pressing need or desire.
Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We’re sick of them.
Chapter 3 is titled “Ask Me if I Care” and does not just introduce a new focal character—although she is mentioned by name in the previous chapter—but hands the narrating duties over to her as well. The reference to the year being 1979 is also significant because the short stories which connect together to form a novelistic narrative are not all set in the same time period nor are they connected to each other chronologically. For instance, that passing reference to Rhea in Chapter 2 is a remembrance by of her as part of a teenage gang that a character named Bennie is recalling he used to hang out. Rhea’s narrative in this section takes the reader back in time to those day as they are happening.
You lurch from the steps to the other end of the fire escape platform, where a window looks into the little alcove where Bix’s computer lives. Bix is in front of it, dreadlocks thick as cigars, typing messages to other graduate students that they’ll read on their computers, and reading messages they send back. According to Bix, this computer-message-sending is going to be huge—way beyond the telephone.
Chapter 10 presents yet another narrative voice, in this case on that is not used very much. The narrator takes the second-person perspective, which means that the reader is directly pulled into the action as the “you” which initiates the first sentence above despite the fact that the narrator is actually a character named Rob. This section also introduces a recurring use of dramatic irony as a result of the time shifts. Oddly enough, this particular paragraph situates the reader as the “you” in two different ways: first as the person being addressed by Rob and secondly through kinship with Bix since the reader knows that his prediction about messaging will prove true to a far greater extent than even Bix imagines.
Alex had first heard Bennie Salazar’s name from a girl he’d dated once, when he was new to New York and Bennie was still famous. The girl had worked for him—Alex remembered this clearly—but it was practically all he could remember; her name, what she’d looked like, what exactly they’d done together —those details had been erased. The only impressions Alex retained of their date involved winter, darkness, and something about a wallet, of all things, but had it been lost? Found? Stolen? The girl’s wallet, or his own?
The final story, “Pure Language” (as well as the chapter immediately preceding it) flash-forwards to a point in the future, thus telling a story completely out sync with the historical settings of the rest of the book. But as several characters are quoted as saying throughout the book, “time’s a goon” and has a way of pushing the past up against the future simply because it wants to. In this near-future which is almost the present and will very soon become the past for the reader, Alex is struggling to recall the name of a girl. A girl for whom—though he doesn’t know it—it all began in the usual way in a bathroom of some hotel.
