About halfway through this book I stopped and looked up and said something forceful to the effect that Holy God, this was the funniest book I'd read in ages. But I hadn't laughed out loud once, because, I realised, there weren't any jokes in it. Narrator Edna Earl is not the sort to go telling jokes; but when she described something as being done 'politely' she actually means the exact opposite, and that's what my English teacher taught me was the definition of irony. It's a little masterpiece of southern US voice and place, like Faulkner via Austen - all the wonderful locutions of language and syntax without the apocalyptic passions. Instead we get Edna Earl and her Uncle Daniel and their familial doings and complications, most arising from Uncle Daniel's heedless largesse and the efforts to restrain his prodigal generosity and the rich comic drama arising from his precipitative second marriage.