I can honestly say that this book is like no other I have read before but I am totally undecided on whether I loved, loathed or tolerated it! 
 Satin Island is set in the corporate world and deals with the overwhelming prospect of finding meaning to our existence and our place in the world around us, through an ethnographic approach. It is set out in the format of, what appear to be, seemingly disjointed journal entries penned by our protagonist, U. These entries help to build an image of the man behind them: U is inquisitive; intelligent; has a questioning mind with a broad spectrum; has diverse tastes; is disassociated with the world around him except in small, exclusive pockets; seemingly unempathetic to world crisis or immune to the ever-presence of them; unemotional; forensic in analysis and cold, clinical and robotic in nature. U is the embodiment of his job description. U is an anthropologist. 
 Despite being able to exact quite a precise study of him, I felt no empathy or understanding for my protagonist. He was my link to the story and I felt he failed in that respect, which is perhaps why I felt no attachment towards this book. U is, like us all I believe, struggling to find meaning and purpose to his life, and this should have made him a compelling protagonist but instead his thoughts were laid out with such clinical precision as to leave no conviviality to emanate from them to the reader. This book left me much like U's personality - cold. 
 U's desire to find a common thread between all the events that happen on earth and divine some grand significance and directive from them can be quite subtly and cleverly evidenced in various tropes McCarthy as deployed throughout the book. U(you), the company he works for (called only The Company, the ambivalent account U is attempting to summarise his findings into (The Great Report) and the secret and nonsensically named project his company is working on (the Koob-Sassen project) are all kept purposefully vague. And this is the base premise of all anthropology and all that U is attempting to decipher. All these examples refer to generalisations instead of actual, individual instances, as anthropology does not deal with the specific but with the overall. 
 This book made me think. Hard! And I believe that any book that makes me evaluate the world around me deserves some credit. It's failings as a fictional read were its saving graces as a non-fictional study of both the mind of an anthropologist and the attempt to find meaning in a chaotic world.