Panorama City Unabridged Library edition

[Audiobook CD Library Edition in vinyl case.]

With its blend of fool's wisdom and deeply felt humanity, Panorama City is heir to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Steve Martin's The Jerk.?

From his deathbed*, twenty-eight-year-old Oppen Porter -- an openhearted, bicycle-riding, binocular-toting, self-described ''slow absorber'' -- unspools into a cassette recorder his tale of self-determination, from ''village idiot'' to ''man of the world,'' for the benefit of his unborn son.

? Told in an astonishingly charming and wise voice, Oppen's account traces forty days and nights navigating the fast-food joints, storefront churches, and home-office psychologists of the San Fernando Valley. Ping-ponging between his watchful, sharp-tongued aunt and an outlaw philosopher with the face ''of a newly hatched crocodile,'' Oppen finds himself constantly in the sights of people who believe that their way is the only way for him.

? Oppen Porter is ''an American original'' (Stewart O'Nan, New York Times bestselling author ) for whom finding one's own way is both a delightful art and a painstaking science. Disarmingly funny and surreptitiously moving, Panorama City makes us see the world, and our place in it, with new eyes.

*Not really