E.M. Forster suggested that you have to choose between plot and character development. Michaelides chooses plot, but he plays with an unreliable narrator's various versions of himself in the plot of this novel The Fury . The narrator is knowing about narration in a way he probably wouldn't be, and is a stand in for the author. I've watched Inside Job a few times on Netflix, and there's a section where Reagan Ridley chooses to not leave the shadow government for love, she wipes the mind of someone else who works for a shadow organization and she loves him, but she doesn't join him in the memory wiped future. Eliot in The Fury tries to imagine himself into a different future, but he can't pull it off. I think a lot about Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). It's the movie he writes after he marries his son's sister. He's trying to provide a narrative where someone gets away with things. He recently put out his 50th movie, and there...