He drifts through life disconnected. Even when a customer at the cafe he works at calls his attention to it, he doesn't quite see it. When a volcano destroys his car and a friend offers a very cheap plane ticket, he decides to find out what life is like outside the rut. That is, assuming he's in one...which he absolutely is, but he has to leave in order to gain perspective. Hemingway wrote, "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another," in The Sun Also Rises. The only rational response to this is, "No duh, but you'll never understand until you see it for yourself, Ernie." In his fourth book, In Search Of..., Matthew Oliphant chronicles a journey that takes place over the course of a few months between 1991 and 2051. While it is a memoir, and all parts of it are true, the story folds in aspects of the world that was, the world that is, and a world as it might yet be. Everything in it happened, but none of it is real. In fact, this book may not even exist.