For the past few years, I've used these essays to reflect somberly on the events of the year, and how they have shaped me as a reader and a person. Unfortunately, the end result has been a series of essays more dismal than a Leonard Cohen concept album about children who have burned to death in chemical factory explosions.

Kinnell was something like a connoisseur of loss, both actual and anticipated. And he anticipated his own, often.

I don’t know whether this book has changed my life; if it has, it will be years before I realize how, or why. I do know that it’s affected me more than any novel I’ve read in years, and I do know that it’s a masterpiece.

Like Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and George Saunders, Fried is a master at the absurdities, small and large, that make up the human condition. He’s a deeply funny, deeply generous author, and on the basis of The Great Frustration, I’m ready to pay him the biggest compliment I could ever give an author: there’s never been a writer exactly like him before.