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Jerichow, Mecklenburg, is Johnson’s answer to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: a setting, both mythic and mundane, for interlocking novels that aspire to a historical reckoning but finally find history unreckonable.

Feckless lamentation, yes, but also a poetic form for an unreckonable history.

The mind blanks at this sheer volume of commentary generated with every elapsing second, this unreckonable tonnage of weigh-ins.

From the kitchen came the servants, half tipsy, with decanters of wine and an unreckonable number of dishes.

The strangeness of it all persistently imposed upon her mind, but was unreckonable, compared to the thought that Quentin Charter would not have called for her, had he been able to come.