Eighteen-year-old James is put through hell in Robert Scollo 's thriller, The Meaning of Life .
Drenched in geopolitics, war, terrorism, and the extraordinary, this novel is a contemporary fairy tale about how one individual can change history.
Scenes are set in staccato manner, their sentences rough as they parse characters and their moods.
More elaborate scenes, such as the one set at the Bank of America Plaza in Dallas, read like parodies of spy thril.