It can be considered in a lineage of similarly demanding tomes that push playful modernist experiment into a region that might be called “impossible”: i.e., the excruciatingly self-involved later Joyce of Finnegans Wake and strange lesser-known works of maximally perverse obscurantism like Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream. Most pages exude that unnerving queasiness which results from seeing a worrying lack of paragraph breaks in the foreseeable near future. And sometimes Lentz throws in a spectral presiding authority, like the one “sitting in this room for over fifty years . I don’t mean broken in an aesthetically volatile and deliberate way, but broken in its approach, in its very thinking. Because Lentz is himself a free jazz musician he deserves a good free jazz analogy.