This is a very good drinking/bar novel, a gush of slapstick pity and despair tracing the career (in both senses of the word) of a drunken barman in L.A. There are no saints, only miserable sinners, and there are only brief and intermittent instants of dignity amidst the depravity. It is, as the title suggests, very episodic, but I've read many texts less worthy of "novel" status than this. The drunkards in this book (which is everyone) are not lovable rogues, but more or less unsatisfactory people (although satisfyingly unique), and as such it's a believable society. There's a serviceable plot, too, which eventually takes wing with a dipso drive to Las Vegas/an unspecified desert town where everyone is even more wasted than back in the bar. A farcical love story occurs, and no one is left any the wiser as to anything, except that drinking is a very bad good idea, and Patrick deWitt is a very bad good writer.