The author of this book is not John Updike. Why (you may ask) are you bringing up John Updike. Well, I have read more books by John Updike than any other author -- no other author is even vaguely close -- and early on in reading this book, I thought of Updike's books. "Updike is known for his well-crafted prose that explores the hidden tensions and problems of middle-class American life." Most were novels and short stories set in America's Northeast. I saw this book --early on -- as sort of a somewhat lower class study of life in the American South. Alabama in this particular case. An interconnected set of characters, in stories spaced apart in time, ebbing and flowing (and mostly very depressed and disappointed in their lives and often very willing to think lesser of those around them. You know. Typical human stuff. At least that's apparently how the author sees it. Then, about two-thirds through the book, after only a couple slight hiccups, the wheels started to come off the cart. What were major character traits soon became less convincing, as if the author had never been expecting to have to flesh them out all the way, and failed to know people with those characteristics well enough to flesh them out, so apparently there was some guessing going on, or, at the every least, some unfounded assumptions. Patterns of behavior shifted without rational explanation. I wondered why the "logic" of the narrative veered off the road it had been on, so much toward the end. It seems that most of the earlier stories (or chapters, which ever you prefer in this case) were written earlier and published as short stories, while the bulk of the last third was not, implying that someone convinced the author to elaborate on the connected narrative of the earlier works wrap every thing up into a nice ending. If that is so, I'm not sure if the author was rushed to finish or never saw its ending as clearly as what came before, but I lost all association with John Updike in the end. I've grown weary of fictional writers that can't research their own characters and their surrounding as extensively as good non-fiction writers have no choice but doing. Throwing out the argument that something is fantasy or science fiction does not make it acceptable for covering up simple ignorance and misunderstandings about how life works in reality, especially when the writing is marketing itself as just that. ( )