It's impossible to fathom why Kunkel introduces the miracle drug, and then renders it utterly beside the point. The novel is built around the idea of Abulinix as the catalyst for all of Dwight's growth, but Kunkel's treatment of the drug, and its effects within Dwight, turns out to be so casual, so lacking in rigor, that the entire conceit falls to pieces. Most of Dwight's big decisions are made for him before the drug can even take effect. Dwight is fired from his crappy tech job before he can decide whether or not to quit. And his girlfriend dumps herself in due course when Dwight decamps New York not for the woods of Vermont but the jungles of Ecuador. How he manages to get himself to Ecuador is still a little hard to explain. The drugs haven't kicked in, so he has to flip a coin--five times. Still, the purchase of a plane ticket, with its multitude of destinations, departure times and seat assignments, should give Dwight a massive brain hemorrhage, but Kunkel just tosses it off via parenthesis. This sort of sloppiness eventually overwhelms the novel.

Critics fell all over themselves to praise Indecision as a brilliant portrait of Dwight's generation, but the novel is far more convincing when it simply tells the story of Dwight's family. About the Wilmerdings who made him, Dwight remarks:

What solitary people my family were! It amazed me that two of its members had ever gotten together to produce the others. But then solitary people pretending not to be--that must be how many families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous.

Instead of hugging and kissing one another, the four Wilmerdings used to deposit hugs and kisses and filial affection on their sad, cowlicky golden retriever (now gone)--as if a pet were a joint savings account. Dwight's parents have divorced, and the various Wilmerdings are not just solitary but all alone. Kunkel oddly seems happier to keep Dwight alone: In a novel that again and again imagines the most radical and the most hopeful possibilities of empathy, Kunkel still makes sure to protect his hero from ever having to confront the reality and gravity of other individuals.

Nonetheless, Dwight can't quite keep a healthy distance from his sister, Alice, a radical anthropologist. A visit to her room tells us everything we need to know about her. There's the tiny twin bed with its "pleasant and reassuringly girlish lavender bedspread," where she has been known to entertain both boys and girls. Above the bed: the stuffed head of an African ibex that Alice, a vegetarian, bagged on her last father-daughter hunting trip. Across from the dead head: an East German propaganda poster that demonstrates the proper use of giant red hammers on capitalist fingers. By these points--bed, taxidermy, poster--Alice is triangulated and surveyed like a plot of land. And in this room, Dwight lies down on her bed as if it were a doctor's couch and in her PJs she plays shrink, pro bono, while puffing theatrically on a "big fat Freudian cigar." But her psychology is less The Interpretation of Dreams and more Das Kapital. Diagnoses Alice: "Part of it is that we belong to a social class and a generation where our parents live too long and remain too economically powerful." Asks Dwight: "Is this going to be Communist therapy?"

Alice has gone reddish, having outlived the cold war and outgrown the dog collars and Izod polos of her "punk WASP bitch" phase. Still, she assures their father that when the revolution comes she will not (a) stand him up against the wall and shoot him personally, or (b) encourage any of her comrades to stand him up against the wall and shoot him.

"Come on, Alice," says Dad instead of thanks, "Show some spine. A diffident revolutionary is no good. I'm a commodities trader. If you don't kill me, who will you?" Which makes her cry.

Mr. Wilmerding is absent-minded enough to lose cars, his fortune, his children and his wife. After golf and a great deal of scotch, he discourses on the long line of cynics from himself back to Diogenes, shouts obscure advice and chucks office supplies straight at Dwight's head. He's the father Odysseus probably was whenever he was stuck on land and at home. And then, there's the matter of their mother, who, between the cheery devout Episcopalianism and the sudden vegetarianism, may or may not have become a nun.

But Dwight skips town before we find out. He switches hemispheres in search of his old prep school crush Natasha, but is instead presented with Brigid, the beautiful Belgian-Argentine anthropologist. Brigid reminds him, and us, of his sister, but the resemblance only goes so far. Brigid, for instance, reacts significantly better when he goes in for a kiss. This is good news for Dwight, but bad news for the rest of us. The special promise and antic, affecting comedy of Indecision's opening chapters do not survive Dwight's not-so-perilous journey through the jungle into Brigid's arms. As Dwight evolves, the novel devolves.

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