Great read ( )

I'm so glad this book was short. Even so, I picked it up and put it down several times, before finishing it off on a subway ride from Queens in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that it takes place during one sex act. That says a lot. Don't bother. ( )

Novels are ways of looking into other people's thoughts, and if you pick your books carefully, those thoughts will be ones you hadn't experienced. When we say a novel is "enriching," we signal the feeling of the density, depth, variety, or interest of the thoughts that we encounter in novels. But novels can also have the opposite effect. They can reveal an imagination so thin, so simple, so impoverished, that it feels unhealthy to think about it for too long. Minot's imagination in this book is brittle. Her sense of how people interact, what they think, what counts as introspection, what comprises interesting meditation, are so thin, so superficial, so uninteresting, that I felt a cold chill as I read. I felt my own sense of what inner life can be slowly weakening. If the book had been longer, I might have stopped reading: not because the book is boring or because she's a bad writer, but because her idea of what it means to think about relationships is so terribly, depressingly pale. Novels can not only be enriching but also impoverishing: they can take away a little of what you feel and think. ( )

Susan Minot really knows how to grab a reader with the opening (I read two paragraphs in-store and bought it). Unfortunately, this is where the talent ends (with this book, at least).

The plot is small scale, and very intimate. So much so that I felt bogged down by too many details that weren't even interesting to begin with.

The story is of two lovers reflecting on their relationship (the man, married, and the woman a colleague). It was obvious a few pages in where this book was going to wind up.

The writing is good and the details are certainly detailed. But the characters are stereotypes and the plot goes nowhere.

Overall, this book fails. ( )

oh, the things that go through your mind when you are going down. a bit contrived, but interesting. ( )