Alan Swallow has a problem with women.  At least, most readers of Every Man Must Build a Home will conclude that its protagonist fails to establish appropriate and satisfactory relationships with Joyce, the woman he lives with; Cindy, his ex-wife; the old drunk he asks for money in Tennessee; Marla the Larchmont teacher who likes them young; or Sarah, at his best friend's house in North Carolina, not even Sarah once again on the coast of Mexico. Not to mention Joyce's lover Joyce, Swallow's mother, numerous aunts, and the haunting memory of Janis Joplin.  Perhaps the key to it is Diane, whom he knew so long ago, before he even knew how to begin to appreciate her, whom he remembers throughout the novel, heads off to see after its mountaintop climax, and then laments in a coda set in a westbound boxcar.  Meanwhile, in an alternate parallel universe, a man named Gray is doing no better with a woman named Jelly Cornfish.  The novel contains a great deal of travel, at least three science fiction plots, and much self-reflexive metafiction, but at heart it is about man repeatedly failing to learn how to be with woman.