Hearsay (Paperback, 2nd ed.)

Like his namesake, Lemuel Gulliver, Lem Grosz, the central character, sees a fair bit of the world, and it is a very odd sort of place. Leaving home at 15, Lem travels from New York to Los Angeles, where he becomes a flagpole sitter and unsuccessfully tries to "shed his humanness." Returning to New York a decade later, Lem finds a home (and begins an affair) with divorcee Connie White; he (mistakenly) thinks he has found his half-sister Lucy in a masseuse named Lucia Lamour; and he is astonished to come home one day and find Connie in bed with Lucy. Lem hits the road again, this time as a courier. During a mysterious assignment in Prague, where, for reasons not fully explained, one John Swift tries to kill him off but fails, dying in the attempt. Lem jets back to New York, where no one expresses any surprise when he takes over John Swift's life: name, wife, child and job. Spielberg's tale tries to be whimsical in a darkly satirical way but never loses its air of studied eccentricity: the author, who needs wings of gossamer to pull this one off, seems mainly to have feet of clay.