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This is a story of overlapping couples who are opposites, all of them drawing together to create a larger human design. The dissimilar men have been best friends since school, as have the contrasting women, and they meet and marry in heterosexual complements. Each couple gives birth to a daughter, also opposites from one another, who become best friends. And then there are the boys they desire, as well as the relationships with each parent, all clashing and complementing in waves.

But the most interesting dynamics are between every pair of the four adults, twisting and weaving together in ways that give unusual strength to the whole. So, when the “striding cheerful giant�� in the group, the one with “torrents of energy,�� suddenly and unexpectedly dies, it leaves them frayed, falling and scrambling to land.

I opened this book having no idea what to expect: I’d read nothing about it, only saw enough five stars from respected gr friends to pique my curiosity about the author. When Zachary, a vibrant, giving, art collector dies unexpectedly on page 4, the book launches us into both past and present to make sense of the irreparably altered bonds. I wondered then if I were a masochist to continue to read: on January 1st of this year, my vibrant, giving, art-collecting father also unexpectedly died, shredding the fabric of my family forever. But, unlike jarring moments during other reads, I found this book cathartic. Whatever the conflicts between the characters, their love for truth and for one another was dominant. That’s not to say it wasn’t fraught and complex: this work is smart and real and written in gorgeous, insightful prose. The high quality, along with the resonating different circumstances, made it the perfect read.

The novel is told in a masterful integration of close third, switching point-of-views quickly, yet seamlessly. We learn where each character comes from, their very different backgrounds that made them who they are, providing us with social and political context as well as psychological. And they are all artists of one kind or another–a painter, a poet, a collector, and a self-image maker, which plays a large part in how they move and grow in the world. Christine, the protagonist and painter, is the one whose struggle is revealed most to us, and her creative expression is key to these relationships, most importantly the one to herself.

“You could not have everything: the whole wisdom of life amounted to that. Whatever you had, was instead of something else.��

I rarely reread, but I’m already looking forward to entering this world again.