Yes. Loud, filthy, yes.

What a filthy, furious, exhausting thing this is! I finished it angry at people who weren't in the room.

The satire works because it never once lets you settle into knowing who is being got at. Every time you decide the target is white liberal complacency it swings and takes out an entire tradition of respectability — then swings again and takes out the reader for having enjoyed the first two. The Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals are one of the great comic inventions of the decade and they're also a bill being presented to a very specific audience.

Two warnings. The plot is a delivery mechanism and it creaks; if you need fiction to be well made in the carpentry sense, this will irritate you. And there's a run through the middle where three jokes get told four times each and the energy dips badly.

Neither matters much. That prologue, in the Supreme Court, told in that voice, is the best opening I've read in twenty years, and the last stretch earns everything it spends. Nine!

Our club couldn't discuss it, because two members had stopped at the third chapter, and I've thought about that failure a great deal since.