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Title: Oprah was wrong
Review: There are some moments of good writing here, but they seem to belong to a short story writer who loses his grip when faced with a long form. Not one of the characters was believably motivated. That is, I could understand the importance of the house, but each separate decision or action made by Les, Kathy or Behrani seemed manipulated by Dubus purely for his own purposes. The failure of the novel to compel my suspension of disbelief was cumulative, so that by the last hundred pages I found every action or decision less and less believable; as the characters had more time to think about what they were doing each appeared increasingly less likely to act as he or she was made to do. I'm incensed that the famous Dubus name dictated a literary marketing scheme: if this book had been sold as a mass-market rather than a trade paperback I wouldn't have wasted hours on it!
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