Sitter is a love story tailormade for cinematically and tragicomically getting across how awful the cosmos is at playing stage for all the human dramas that really ought to be a lot less fraught with hard luck. With an extra-omniscient narrator at the controls, the novel goes where a lot of stories have never gone before. For all his seeming want of the right stuff for making a mark on the world, the artist's model the novel gets its title from might well be as good a model as any for demonstrating how to make the most of this game of life where so many cards are stacked against us.