This book had me on board just a couple of chapters in, knowing it wasn't the kind of book that was going to end in any conventional way. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character who recur only as side characters in the other chapters. It's as though every character is a mysterious talisman with obscure powers as viewed by all the others. Through all the chapters the passage of time, lurching from distant past to barely recognizable future, makes its inexorable mark magnifying some events while fading others so that only one person can half remember them. Reviews talk about the slide deck chapter, but that is just one more chunk of artifice, differing from the other chapters only in degree. There have been other novels with interlocking sets of characters and told from different viewpoints but this one is done in a brilliant fashion so that you feel as though each narrator is being given a spotlight on their interior life, not necessarily in the chapter which was being told from their own viewpoint. It reminded me of the book [b:The Making of Incarnation|57005202|The Making of Incarnation|Tom McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1620080163l/57005202.SX50.jpg|87729884] which I took in not long ago, but the pace never dragged to the extent that book did.

A lot of what happens along the course of this book is there to make you cringe. You see the bad thing about to happen, you feel it when it hits, and you learn the consequences of it right away and sometimes long after. I'm not sure how the author managed to keep everything straight when drafting this novel. Things happen all over the place over the span of decade, people change radically from one appearance to the next, and some mysteries are never solved. It could easily have fallen apart into an accumulation of pointless anecdotes, but somehow there are connections that tie things together so you feel like there are always stakes.

The narrator of this audiobook did a great job bringing out the differences between all the characters, during different stages in their lives. I'm looking forward to reading the author's book that came out last year.