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I really like the novel The Sorrows of an American.  It's different from many things I've read before, and is definetely something I'd recommend to other people.  We talked in our small sessions about whether or not the narrator was left ambigious on purpous or not at the beginning... but thinking about it, I wonder if it was on accident.  People often write things knowing exactly what they are going to say and knowing almost everything about the characters.  So Hustvedt may have accidentally left out the knowladge that the narrator was a man, leaving the "reveal" on page 8 to be surprising to the reader.  Hustvedt may have realized this and not changed it, or because she knew that the narrator would be male all along, did not change it because she did not realize what she had done.