Beha is excellent at establishing his characters as representatives of particular intellectual worldviews; he doesn’t have to pin them down because they keep trying to do it to one another ... an impressive performance. Beha writes like an insider about a wide range of human experiences ... Sometimes the architecture of the plot seems grander and more elaborate than the story housed in it requires — about a family forced to re-evaluate itself as vitality shifts from one generation to the next. There are coincidences, chance encounters, faith healers, high crimes, medical emergencies and other disasters. The argument against analytics is really that there’s something human and elusive the numbers can’t account for, but the improbable here ends up scoring a lot of points ... There are also moving passages of carefully rendered points of view ... the kind of long novel that begins to occupy its own time zone in your life: Like a trader who has to wait for some foreign market to open, you keep returning to this world, waiting for fresh news.
Beha brings to messy life a post-9/11 New York City in a character-rich novel that’s funny, poignant, prescient, and somehow sweetly deft in the willing suspension of disbelief as a syzygy of coincidences careens toward a perfect storm.
... moving and pleasurable ... the book skillfully links characters trying to regain their balance in a world where their lives, like ours, have been radically disrupted ... Any novel that begins with an apocalyptic prophecy summons the feel of Chekhov’s first act gun, but Beha is up to the challenge ... The ambitions, passions and neuroses of these characters become the ingredients for a hearty stew of concealment, betrayal, manipulation and longing that Beha patiently brings to a boil. The machinations of this cleverly plotted novel are too numerous to summarize in a way that’s even remotely useful, but they’re united by a timeless theme ... Beha also seamlessly connects his characters to headline-grabbing events of recent years. Whether it’s the scandal-tarnished celebrity seeking redemption after a precipitous fall from grace, the inside trader or the plagiarist, there’s a certain roman-à-clef quality to the story that adds unobtrusive spice. In its breadth and ambition, Beha’s novel sits comfortably aside contemporary portraits of New York City ... But for all its immediacy, there’s also a timeless feel that evokes Dickens or Dostoevsky ... a sumptuous novel that calls insistently to the reader to return to it in those moments when it’s put aside, fueled by the elemental desire simply to find out what’s going to happen next. Beyond his mastery of the storyteller’s craft, Beha seriously engages with a range of moral quandaries that make the book much more than a page-turner with literary pretensions: What does it mean to be a good person? How do we measure the enduring worth of a life? Can good emerge from a great wrong? These questions and others tug at us while we’re reading and linger in the mind long after we’re done.
... with impressive craft Mr. Beha arranges their individual collapses into a chain of toppling dominos ... In his 2012 debut, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Mr. Beha struggled to work out a private quarrel with postmodernism and narrative irony, but in this novel he has confidently embraced a style of traditional realism. What is striking is the absence of satire or polemic. Mr. Beha never exaggerates the tawdriness of his characters, and the sympathetic portrayals are all the more damning because they make their transgressions seem inherent to the environment rather than the aberrations of a particularly nasty class of people. Realism is in fact the costume he has patiently designed to disguise a vision of fallen humanity ... The only irony in this absorbing and satisfying novel is the cosmic kind. There is a force operating on their lives that eludes analysis and that can only be glimpsed once it’s too late to escape.
... thoughtful and entertaining ... a deeply readable, contemporary take on the spirit of the age in which we live ... Deeper philosophical questions underlie this engaging narrative ... Beha’s pacing is smooth. I like the way he moves the reader forward in a page-turning mode and never signals any obvious turns. The characters are well-drawn and sympathetic. Importantly, there are implicit questions about where to place your faith – in money, religion, statistics, country: Questions that leave you thinking.
Beha is the editor of Harper’s, and this story evokes the spirit of two famous essays the magazine published championing the social novel: Tom Wolfe’s Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast and Jonathan Franzen’s Why Bother? ... can feel a tick too orderly, as Beha carefully maintains his large cast and big themes. But each character is engaging and full-blooded, and Beha pushes them hard: He’s concerned with how irrationality worms its way into everybody’s lives (via infidelity, faith, insider trading, plagiarism, addiction) and how that irrationality can undermine us and push us closer to understanding ourselves ... though the novel’s tone is more intellectual than what Wolfe and Franzen prescribed, its breadth, ambition, and command are refreshing ... An admirably big-picture, multivalent family saga.
... gripping ... Filled with stunning acts of hubris and betrayal, Beha’s deliciously downbeat novel picks apart the zeitgeist, revealing a culture of schemers and charlatans. This cutting send-up of New York progressive elitism should do much to expand Beha’s audience.
