Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!

The narrator, Wilbur Swain, is a very old former president of the United States who lives in the ruins of New York City, now a place of plague, collapse and gravity that changes unpredictably. He recalls his unusual childhood with his twin sister Eliza, with whom he shared a remarkable closeness. The novel imagines a government that tries to cure loneliness by giving every citizen a new extended family. It is a comic, melancholy book about loneliness, family and community, and the author himself regarded it as deeply personal.