The Voice Recommends: Seven Days in Rio

In Francis Levy’s rather hilarious new novel Seven Days in Rio, an American C.P.A. named Kenny Cantor goes on vacation in Rio de Janeiro to indulge his life-long love of the sex trade. But in Levy’s phantasmagorical satire, Rio is a place where virtually every woman is a prostitute, or as Kenny likes to call them, a “Tiffany.” Levy follows Kenny’s misadventures in this comically exaggerated world, exploits that also manage to serve up a withering satire of Lacanian psychology (among other schools o’ shrinkage). Maybe the funniest American novel since Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask.