What a bizarre book, you can sum it up quickly: a woman dies, and as a sort of posthumous revenge against her husband she has him promise to bring her body to Jefferson, a place far enough for some poor fellows. And on the way there, hell breaks loose.
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The characters, and the language, and the writing, and the relationships among them, and the rawness of their reactions, and their way of thinking, and secrets and lies, and the things they say and do not say, are everything. The father is a vain, lazy, miserable man, the children are: practical/selfless, melancholic/mad, fierce/passionate, private/determined, childish/mad. And together they create an orchestra of voices juxtaposed in such a harmonic complex manner.
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Didn't expect it like that, pleasantly surprised.