The Dewey Decimal System (novel)

PopMatters lauded Larson's characterization, and stated that Decimal's many flaws – in addition to amnesia, he also has obsessive-compulsive disorder – make him an archetypical private eye.^[1]

The A.V. Club praised the novel's premise and setting, with "patches of roughhewn poetry", but overall found it to be "frustrating" and "stilted (and) self-conscious", stating that Larson had insufficient "storytelling skill to match (the novel's) voice and vision".^[2]

Publishers Weekly felt that the relationships between characters "fail(ed) to engage", and that the "violence too often substitute(d) for plot coherence".^[3]

Larson has said that the book's genesis was the image of a "beautifully dressed black man, asleep on the floor of the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library main branch", and that the character of Dewey Decimal is based partly on his cousins and grandfather (who were all veterans), and partly on a homeless man of Larson's acquaintance named "Chicago" (who "slept rough but dressed like a mod squad Desmond Dekker type").^[4]