The main one is that the characters are rarely, if ever, engaging. It was a condensed version of what I think the book as a whole hoped to achieve but, imho, generally didn’t.I think there are some pretty big flaws in the book.
One section, a collection of “fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s”, I thought excellent, putting across a captivating picture of a time by magnifying scattered episodes in the various characters’ lives. I wanted to love this book: I love the ambition of it, the size of the themes (in a nutshell, American life in the second half of the 20th century) and the need to deal with them as a whole, the crunch in some of the writing, and much of the scattershot approach.
(This has ended up as a bit of a waffling review sorry in my defence it’s a big book!)After being unimpressed by Falling Man I was a bit of a Don-sceptic, and remain so.
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