In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what put them in danger, it is also what guaranteed them their safety in the end. But forty years later, when Carl's mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that nobody ever really got over anything.
Brodesser-Akner is ridiculously clever, but never overly so and never merely for the sake of showing off her prodigious way with words. A big reason I love her writing — in any medium — is that every sentence serves the whole. Every word is carefully chosen and I trust that the journey she takes us on will end at a destination worth visiting ... This isn't a breezy beach read and, like Fleishman, you want to restart it as soon as you're done, to find what you missed.
At times the novel exhausts itself. It can seem a little like a machine that won’t power down even after it has started smoking ... The more time you spend with each character, the more delusional they seem to be, even as a sense of novelistic sympathy wells. Brodesser-Akner’s magpie style, layering a hum of worry with dialogue and voice-mails and scenes from mobile-phone games, has a singsongy appeal, but it can be difficult to sustain such a high-strung voice over nearly 500 pages.