Communication—orthe lack thereof—is the subject of this sly update of the picaresque.<em> No One Writes Back</em> is the story of ayoung man who leaves home with only his blind dog, an MP3 player, and a book,traveling aimlessly for three years, from motel to motel, meeting people on theroad. Rather than learn the names of his fellow travelers—or invent nicknamesfor them—he assigns them numbers. There’s 239, for example, who once dreamed ofbeing a poet, but who now only reads her poems to a friend in a coma; there’s109, who rides trains endlessly because of a broken heart; and 32, who’s alreadydecided to commit suicide. The narrator writes letters to these men and womenin the hope that he can console them in their various miseries, as well as keepa record of his own experiences: “A letter is like a journal entry for me,except that it gets sent to other people.” No one writes back, of course, but thatdoesn’t mean that there isn’t some hope that one of them will, someday . . .