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Benjamin Kunkel, a founder of the literary journal n+1 (and former Voice reviewer), manages to whip up a cerebral novel that doesn't feel overly, uh, cerebral. He does this partly through the funny, familiar quality of characters' conversations and partly by adding a plotline that thrusts our hero into the jungles of Ecuador with a female anthropologist. There he grapples with colonialism, the nature of personal freedom, and ecological destruction—all while freaking out on a pretty powerful native intoxicant. "Don't make a career out of your childhood," Dwight's father once advised, and out there in the wild, he just might find a way to start growing up.