Kotzwinkle's protagonist is a successful actor, David Caspian, who is at the pinnacle of his career in big-budget action films. But Caspian is slowly losing his psychic identity to a kind of "double" named Felix Falkenhayn, who is living in Germany during the war. The actor has reached a point in his career where he could be complacent and repetitive (as his agent advises) or he could keep responding to the challenges of his craft. Living amid all of the temptations of a sybaritic and pampered existence, Caspian finds his family falling apart, his work becoming stale, his sense of himself disintegrating into fragments of escapist activity, and his sanity threatened by what appear to be episodes of psychic transference.

This dual existence may be a register of the schism between realities that an actor faces when he falls too deeply into his roles, but it also represents...