The more I think about this book, the more annoyed I get. I struggled to get through the first hundred pages, and then it seemed to pick up a bit: a novel about four friends in New York, okay, I can deal with that. Then it appeared not to be about that at all - it was a novel about Willem and Jude, and then mostly about Jude, and then it all got too much. I get that some people have terrible lives and crap happens, but the author piled on the misery on to Jude so high and so heavy that it was just too much. Once you got through that, you sort of knew what was coming. And once it did, the book should've ended there: the last 100 or so pages really irritated me. The book overstayed its welcome by a long way: if you're going to write a long book, make sure your story can stand it, and make sure you're not just giving the reader pages of exposition and telling us everything. It's boring. Too worthy for words - or, at least, 700 pages worth of words.