RaveThe Boston ReviewKushner stages a series of failures as her characters attempt to engage with larger social histories...they keep trying, but failing, to mine their attentiveness to work and relationships not only for daily sustenance but for broader, shareable understanding too … If conventional novels represent individual voices as important elements of a wider social dialogue, Kushner turns the convention on its head. Rather than defend her characters’ relevance, she has them struggle toward the realization that their lives might not be very relevant or exemplary after all—and that even they can learn little from what happens to them … Kushner does not indulge in a liberal fantasy that the individual and the private are the most important dimensions of social knowledge—or in the converse Marxist fantasy that one can explain individual experience through larger social systems. Instead, her sheltered characters convey a hesitation about the extent to which our private lives can be meaningful interventions into loftier historical narratives
