Granted, a psychoanalytical detective novel written as a meditation on the Seven Deadly Sins, isn't the most original of plot structures. The movies and books made on the subject are many, examining how the sinner is not so different from the saint, and how in a web of mystery and lies, sin can often take the form of virtue. In American Purgatorio, however, we can take confidence in the fact that coolly talented John Haskell constructs a genre-blasting, heart rendering tale of one man's cross-country journey of loss and desire with emotional, yet precise prose.

American Purgatorio is a story of a man who walks out of a New Jersey convenience store to find his wife, his car and his life gone without a trace. Holding minimal pieces of a shattered memory, Jack, a name the protagonist wears loosely, chooses to deny the obvious, convinced instead that there must be a mistake, a miscommunication- maybe his wife, Anne, misunderstood where to meet him, maybe the Latino gas station attendants don't comprehend English. For Jack, a plausible deniability must exist for every scenario that doesn't involve Anne safe and sound. Bystanders, he says egotistically, "were probably telling the truth, but it wasn't my truth, and certainly not the truth about Anne". The disappearance of his beloved wife, Jack fears, may call into question the very meaning and value of his own life.

Back home in Brooklyn, aching to do anything to find her, Jack stumbles upon a map of the United States in Anne’s study. On the map, a route from Brooklyn to San Diego is highlighted, with places like Lexington, Kentucky and Boulder, Colorado circled in various shades of ink. Convinced that this map is a message from his wife, and of his ability to decipher it, he sets off to follow it precisely.

At first, his motivation seems clear, find his wife and return to normalcy. Once on the road and mingling with an assortment of sometimes two dimensional, often stereotypical, characters, he questions the legitimacy of his feelings as his memory of that fateful afternoon begins to return. He tries to comprehend and relate things that he doesn’t even understand,

I tried to explain to her about Anne and what I was doing. I told her it felt as if a door was slowly closing in front of me, and that behind that door there was something I was still connected to.

"Do what you need to do," she said, briefly opening her arms.

And as I watched her arms open and then dangle there against her hips, I thought, Why couldn't that door also be here? Why did I have to go somewhere? Why couldn't I somehow see in these things here, or be connected through these things, this other thing I was looking for?

"I can't tell," she said. "Are you kidding?"

Each chapter in American Purgatorio is entitled for one of St. Thomas Aquinas's "Seven Deadly Sins", which Jack is supposed to confront and conquer on his cross-country journey to reunite with Anne. Here, the novel tends to become problematic trying to weave finer points of the original, Il Purgatorio by Dante through the plot. In "Luxuria" (chapter 4), promiscuous hippie couple Fletcher and Feather try to "escort" Jack through this illusory ring of hell by engaging him in drug induced sensual and homoerotic behaviors. While these scenarios are at times funny and endearing, their overall reference to a particular sin (chapter) comes across as forced and takes away from the incredible, ephemeral quality of the narration.

Instead, the real beauty is in Jack's personal transformation as he heads to the West Coast. He comes to realize his love for his wife was self-serving, nearly co-dependant to the point that he couldn't remember one bad thing about her. He loved Anne, "Like an amputee with a lost limb." He calls her his "desire" and that in searching for her his, "desire contains within itself the seed of possible attainment". However, lust is not a virtue and one doesn't attain a goal through avarice. It was because of his betrayal of love that his mortal sins entombed him. Hope only lies in Jack's unusual means of shedding these grave sins, through which, he may not only grant himself atonement, but also, possibly, he will reunite with Anne.