The Limits of Vision

The Limits of Vision is Robert Irwin's irrepressibly entertaining and imaginative novel about a young housewife named Marcia and the war she wages against dirt. Set over the course of a single day as Marcia goes about her quotidian activities—having the girls over for coffee, tidying the house, making dinner—it becomes increasingly clear that her sanity is unraveling at an alarming rate. Irwin is at his creative best here, as he describes Marcia's conversations with Mucor, the "mouthpiece for the Dirt, the Empire of Decay and Ruin, the Principle of Evil," as well as such scientists and artists of the past as William Blake, Charles Dickens, Leonardo da Vinci, and Charles Darwin.