What are his demands? Certainly he wants sex, the “results” he tries to “produce” with several of the women he encounters. Aside from that, he may be enacting the detective novel the silentiary thought about writing, trying to solve a mystery largely of his own invention, something he conjured up out of a couple of superficial coincidences to pander to his boss and create a lurid commodity for the agency to sell. The mystery has some connection to his own life, but the problem of a parent’s suicide can’t be solved by deductive reasoning. Nor, as he knows full well, can reason resolve the enigma of the facial expressions of people who’ve just killed themselves.

Like every protagonist in the trilogy, he has a mutinous attitude toward his boss. His two earlier counterparts are tormented by financial anxiety and spend a lot of time pondering intricate accounting schemes; this narrator would like to keep his job but otherwise appears almost devoid of financial anxiety or ambition. The histrionics that accompany several of his romances cause him no anguish but serve only to keep him mildly entertained and, occasionally, sexually slaked. The factors that are causing him to ponder suicide seem to be external: each day brings him closer to his birthday when he will reach the age his father was when he committed suicide—on his birthday. He also toys with the idea that suicide might be genetic; his grandfather boasted about the number of soldiers and suicides in the family. (The one suicide in the book whose motivation is perfectly clear is that of cousin Paolo, who kills himself out of terror of the grandfather, to escape his vengeful patriarchal rule.) Perhaps—why not?—the narrator will enter into a suicide pact. Is he in the grip of a death drive pushing him to do himself in, or is he telling himself a story, building, out of a couple of coincidences, a plot, a theory?

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