I read Daphne du Maurier's "Monte Verita" yesterday. In that story, there's a passage that reads: 
 "I have a theory that each man's life is like a pack of cards, and those we meet and sometimes love are shuffled with us. We find ourselves in the same suit, held by the hand of Fate. The game is played, we are discarded, and pass on." 
 With all of the circling back and interwoven lives, I suspect D'Aprix Sweeney was going for this kind of effect, but du Maurier works it better. D'Aprix Sweeney uses too many words with too much overused language to describe things. The novel feels too labored for me to really enjoy it. 
 I didn't think I would finish this one---there are so many chapters---but against all odds, I made it to the end, including the epilogue even though I'm coming to believe that epilogues are largely gratuitous. 
 This novel is about a bunch of people from New York City who make bad, selfish decisions, are petulant when no one wants to bail them out, and then experience individual and collective sort-of awakenings that make for a saccharin ending. I see what other reviewers were talking about when they said the ending was cliched. 
 The audiobook was basically eleven hours of annoying people whining about their lives. There were a couple of characters I liked, but for the most part I didn't care at all what happened to these people. The best thing they could do but won't because they wouldn't want to risk ending up somewhere that didn't have artisanal cocktails would be to get the heck out of New York and out of their own heads and see another part of the world, or at least another part of the country. Seriously, just go to the Midwest or somewhere where you can stop thinking you're the center of the universe. After this novel, I might have to swear off novels set in NYC for a good while.