PositiveLos Angeles Times[The novel] takes Wharton’s bleak, turn-of-the-century dirge and updates it to the equally bleak Trump era ... As Benjamin wrangles her characters into straits of heightened topicality, she focuses, like Wharton, exclusively on Ethan’s point of view. Through him, we see a culture mired in bewildering metamorphoses about which he remains deeply suspicious ... The novel nods toward a lot of hot buttons — transphobia, rape culture, hot takes, the whole post-truth smorgasbord — without ever really pushing any. Ethan is meant to typify male fragility but also — as the only character given full interiority — to earn our sympathies (or at least our interest). It is a difficult balancing act, and at times the scales tip toward villainy, as when Ethan crankily dismisses his wife for calling a customer service hotline ... It is not the transposition of that well-trod narrative and its character types that compels; it is the contrast sharpened in the act. Wharton’s world is isolated, stifling and dire, and the political implications of her characters’ choices are subtextual. In the polarized, interconnected present of Benjamin’s novel, everything is expressly political, even the ostensibly apolitical. What this shift sacrifices in symbolic subtlety, it earns back in emotional depth ... Perhaps the most effective update comes in the conclusion. Benjamin subverts Wharton’s notorious ending in a way that doesn’t just surprise; it complicates.
