This was my first Oates book, but it won’t be my last. I don’t know if it’s representative of her style, but I hope it is.

It took longer than usual to warm to the writing style here — Oates includes flashbacks and digressions without any real warning, and it felt disjointed until about 100 pages in. Once I was in though, I was all the way in.

The characters all felt real — even Michael Sr., whose story is absolutely heartbreaking. The last section of his was incredibly difficult to read, and it will echo around in my head for a long time. Each character’s story felt 100% earned, even when, at a distance, it’s kind of cliche or too perfect.

Many of the reviewers seem to quibble with the realism of the story, and whether a certain character would ever do the things that they do in this book. But life works that way too! People do things that don’t make sense, even to themselves. Life is messy and difficult, and humans are imperfect and complicated.

This book captures that perfectly — in many ways it feels like the book Franzen has been trying to write for a long time.