After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony , Men of Action treads the line between memoir and meditation, and is at once elegiac, spare, and profoundly intimate. 'Like Harley J. Spiller's...