So what's it about? Beats me. It's ostensibly about a woman named Monica trying to find out about her parents, particularly her mother, who was a hippie dropout in the '60s.

The path is not straightforward, however, and the story itself is told on a few different levels. More observant readers than I noted how different page colors in the book itself are a clue to the narrative's source.

Monica herself is a classically unreliable narrator and Clowes has packed his latest book with more elisions, ellipses, obfuscations and misdirections than are found in any of his other volumes.

Several years ago Clowes dropped a sort of manifesto in an issue of Eightball after which his work took on a decidedly Nabokovian aspect. A painter named Krugg probably signals this influence and perhaps the marshalling of all available macro and micro details to serve an intensely powerful singular vision is also thus inspired.

There are some devastatingly convincing character sketches as well as a run through quite a few number of genres. The EC war comics jumped out at me immediately, but for some of the others I had to rely on this interview with Clowes in the New Yorker magazine.