Beneath a road novel (23-year-old suicidal male crossing 1970's America in cars, trains, trucks, or stranded for days with his thumb out beside Interstate highways); three different science fiction novels  (1: someone, somewhere, replacing the people around us with androids; 2: an underground chemist creating a way to go metachemical; 3: a band of deep-space image artists facing the exhaustion of the material universe); and a metafictive circus (narrators arguing amongst themselves, a grant proposal containing an outline of the novel, and a take-home exam on what we're reading) readers of Every Man Must Build a Home will find a consistent metaphysical premise.  With just the right way of looking, one can see through the objects of this world, to the other side.  The novel's protagonist can see things this way.  And the fractured, reflecting structure of the novel seems to ask the reader to learn how to do so as well.