Defying his genes, Radar Radmanovic, son of a Serbian electrician and a white New Jersey woman, is born black. What does his identity have to do with a group of performance artists who set up their pieces in global war zones? Plenty as it turns out. The bloated novel dazzles in its period pieces but is sometimes, quite literally, at sea. The immensely gifted Larsen aims high, but the central conceit about the definition of art is hard to buy into. Nevertheless Radar is mesmerizing enough to keep you hooked for most of its nearly 700 pages. No easy feat.
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