It’s sad that this is what gets heralded as “intelligent literature.” Perhaps the reviewers who said this were flattered by their own catches of Messud’s jokes about R Yates, DF Wallace, and Musil. The novel is extremely well structured and executed—and it’s not simple—but it is a quick read, and (incredibly, considering it means to satirize a whole spoiled generation and that it re/dissolves in 9/11) a light one. It’s “intelligent literature,” I suppose, for exactly the chick-lit-loving generation it maligns, which is also the demographic which has read the book and made it famous.

I enjoyed it, for the bits of sex (never had or told, in this book, without extreme irony), the satire, the view into a certain closed society, the mastery of plot construction. But I dislike the characters even more than the author does: they are truly dull, even if much time is spent on their so-called development. The best character, and the protagonist of sorts—Danielle—is somehow a chick-lit rendition of a Murakami hero. Despite the excessiveness of life around her and the delusions into which she falls, she is hardboiled and spare, in her life in tall buildings, not so much alienated as alienating.

With the exception of the first Chapter, which is very nice, several scenes at the beginning of the book are particularly cold and forced--perhaps because they are only there as scaffolding for the larger construction. Later, Messud’s efforts at crackling wit or accidental insight are better, and in some lines from Ludo and Murray she delivers her best offerings.

Why is it the men who get the good lines? It is the same two men, and peripherally a third, who are the book’s only agents of change—even though the principal characters affected by the book’s drama are two women. Yet another quality of chick lit.