This is an American novel of formed chaos playfully enacting the centrality of language in late twentieth-century art and life through the voices of two women steeped in Western traditions, one telling the story of her restoration of an ante-bellum house on the Florida Gulf Coast, the other faithfully recording it but running culturally wild in the process.

In both literal and extended senses, The Restorationist is a mystery, with attendant bafflements, horrors, attempts to get to the bottom of things: mayhem and murder; artifices of trivialization by media, our technological doubles; arrangements of power in communities and in texts; signs and selves.