How do people get so crazy? LR Penn, it seems, knows exactly how. The Syzygy is a triptych constructed from a series of stylistically disparate narratives that portray, in their own words, the novel’s main characters, three young adults working in Silicon Valley: a patient in session with her psychotherapist, a blogger spouting male chauvinist propaganda, and a man in confinement confessing to his misdeeds. Over the course of the novel, the roots of the characters’ personalities are exposed and it is possible to discern how the forces that shaped their lives have instilled in them the anger, guilt, love, and lust that now govern their behavior. The book’s title refers to the interactions among the celestial bodies in a gravitational system, and is suggestive of the inevitability of the calamitous events that lead to the novel’s dramatic conclusion, as dictated by the inescapable past that is haunting each of the three protagonists.
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