I found out about this through reading some other book, a non-fiction one where the author mentioned it in passing. All she said was that a man gets stranded on the concrete island between three highways - it is so much more than that. This is also the man who wrote 'Crash,' which was turned into a movie 'about car crashes and sex.' This, however, is the first I've read of him. There are three characters in this book - the crash-ee, and two vagrants living on the 'island' since before him; one is a woman of divers loose morals, the other a damaged circus trapeze-man. Haunting, in part due to the reader's distance from the characters (the woman seems to have the only glimpses of humanity in the book, in a way) and in part due to the serious mind-games the main character engages in later on in the book.