This book con­cerns two fair­ly unusu­al sub­jects: an elder­ly man and the coun­try of Nor­way. Shel­don Horowitz, the eighty-two-year-old hero, is skill­ful­ly drawn — iras­ci­ble, nurs­ing old wounds, maybe suf­fer­ing from demen­tia, but maybe not. He’s a com­plex char­ac­ter who has vivid mem­o­ries of land­ing on the beach at Inchon in Korea, though his wife is sure he served as a desk clerk in Pusan the whole time. Shel­don feels that if he has demen­tia, it is only mak­ing him more lucid because it’s strip­ping away life’s triv­ia and forc­ing him to remem­ber its essen­tials. He remem­bers urg­ing his beloved son, Saul, to fight in Viet­nam, and visu­al­izes him­self along for the ride on the search-and-res­cue mis­sion that result­ed in Saul’s death. He finds him­self speak­ing to his long-dead friend, Bill. Most of all, he mor­al­izes out loud to the mute lit­tle boy he is try­ing to save from a Koso­var gang oper­at­ing in beau­ti­ful, inno­cent Nor­way. The coun­try itself is almost a char­ac­ter in the book — wealthy, naïve, will­ing to take in the world’s refugees with­out real­ly exam­in­ing where they’ve come from and why. Sigrid, the slight­ly cyn­i­cal police­woman inves­ti­gat­ing a mur­der involv­ing the gang, is a bril­liant mouth­piece for the author’s mis­giv­ings about the Nor­we­gian ten­den­cy to some­times stare evil in the face and not see it.