Mark Perdue and Roger Hoberman have nothing in common except the joy of adjoining yards. Mark is a whiz-kid physicist who knows that his genius stature and his endowed chair at Berkeley are bits of dumb luck; Roger is the owner of a pizza franchise whose luck has turned dumb in financial and marital distress, he has been denied child visitation rights but not babysitting obligations.
Now luck, in the form of an adverse claim on their property, brings Mark and Roger together for a fateful Halloween night neither of them will ever forget. Loony, humane, and transcendently wise,...

"California's Over leads us down an unmarked road to the coast and then deep into the rotten, labyrinthine house where James Farmican, the famous poet, shot himself to death years ago, leaving behind a legacy of adulation and bankruptcy. Now his family is leaving, and the young narrator--who calls himself Baelthon--has been hired to haul the furniture onto the lawn and sort through the attic and basement. But as Baelthon excavates, he also discovers layers of family mystery and comedy and cruelty, all of it piled too deeply for anyone to sort out: the unexplained disappearance of Farmican's...

Mark Perdue has so many problems that when he starts feeling chest pains on the tarmac at LAX, it dawns on him that a heart attack might be an efficient way out. Once an eminent physicist, he hasn't published or had a new idea in a decade. The younger professors at UC Berkeley pity him, and he's taken to using the back staircases to avoid their looks. At home, his wife has been inconsolable since the recent late-term abortion of their afflicted fetus. And he can't deny it any longer--he is decidedly losing his mental faculties to chronic Lyme disease.

Now Mark is visiting Los Angeles with...