2.5 rounded up to 3

The first half of the novel alternates between the history of the 4 sibling somewhat main characters’ parents, and the setup for a “legendary” party. It’s kind of American Snuggie Bain diet lite, but it does pretty effectively set up a very great character moment—perhaps the only truly great moment of the novel—for Nina, the protagonist of the story, more-or-less. Because so much of the novel is the family history, which is the embodiment of American cliché, I won’t go into it. It does feel like a boiling point coming to a head as it builds up though, and is when the novel kept me most interested.

The second half of the novel is the events of the party itself, which pretty categorically did not work for me whatsoever. Sure the family went from rags to riches to rags to riches. But the constant focusing on inane details of the party and characters that have no other function than to perform the way rich people completely devoid of literary interest do. They’re shallow lifeless, selfish beings.

The problem is… we already know this. Literally everybody does. I do. Not. Care. About rich people and their selfishness, generally, but specifically at a party that is out of hand. It is so hard to keep being interested as random people show how they’re a specific kind of an asshole, all of which has a vague through line as a theme, which is broken people break things, rich people suck, etc. etc.

This backdrop provides the intensely late inciting incident for Nina and her siblings, and the fantastic character moment that pushes this to 3 stars. It finally makes the first half pertinent (though still overwritten, I’d argue) and is so satisfying because it isn’t just character development, it is a decision and a moment with weight of history behind it. And because Nina was the only person I found myself caring about in this entire novel, I got a lot of payoff from that.

This historical through line that annunciated the character moment was so good and has such an interesting thing to say about family and the weight of family—present in our lives and otherwise—and the inheritance we get from our parents. How we deal with it, how it shapes us, and the dynamics of obligation such a thing has on the individual and family unit. I really liked that about this novel.

The rest, however, is pure chaff. The things that happened to characters that aren’t developed or rendered feels more than superfluous. It’s actually actively annoying. It feels like random things happening to random people, trying to get the reader to empathize with everyone and everything in a we-are-all-human-kind-of-way but it’s not descriptive writing. It’s not evocative or interesting. It’s just there. Blandly presented, with these events trying to roughly sketch people we know matter very little, and feel like they matter exactly that much. The whole party just made me remember how much I hate drunk people and parties and I didn’t need half a book about the same kind of person having moments we have all heard about at one party or another.

The entire party could have been a page or two in a novella and the first part, the family history, significantly truncated as well, and I think that would have made it such a fantastic novella or short story with originality, and verve.