Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel researches death on the Internet; mulls over distant and intimate stories of suicides, serial killers, and “natural deaths”; and wanders about LA’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts both the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.