A long time since I have enjoyed a book, page by page, as much as this. I suppose it would be called middlebrow ... there is no grand message or theme, except that the confusion of life gives it its richness (perhaps).
But somehow the central conflicts fizzle out in the end. Mark, the husband who cheated on his wife and had to suffer the divorce by her, pines for her, but ultimately marries someone else; its not clear how he comes to that decision. Daisy, Mark's high-school age daughter is sleeping with an older man who is actually a close family friend (and who seems truly, believably, repulsive in his social acceptability). She stops doing so once she is found out by Mark, but we dont know what that felt like to her. And Eva, Mark's ex-wife, refuses to be reconciled to Mark but chooses a banal companion, Everett (who is barely sketched out).
Why did these circumstances resolve in this way? How? The conflicts have been so deeply, so affectingly presented that their muted, dodged, denoument is very disappointing.
3*
(Apr 2008)
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