The Unloved

References to characters either loved or unloved recur throughout this episodic and not always convincing novel from Levy, author of Swimming Home, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It opens with a police inspector interviewing the guests at a château in the French Pyrenees. One of the guests may have been murdered, but this isn't a mystery. It is an intentionally chaotic, muddled, and introspective work with an international cast of characters. This reviewer needed a chart to keep track of them all; characters are sometimes named but too often referred to only by their nationality. In starts and stops, the novel reveals the events that led to the guest's suspicious death. Instead of a chronological or straightforward recounting of the facts, however, we get a series of conversations, interior monologs, snippets, and digressions told from various perspectives. This is part of the book's conceit but will leave many adrift.