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This book is like a mashup of “Almost Famous” and Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” So, not great. The writing in the first half has a lot of run-on sentences and badly needed an editor. The last half is much better written, but doesn’t really make up for shaky start. Ultimately, the theme of the book is that even the most intense female friendship can’t survive one of the friends choosing marriage and children. The main character, first person narrator, who remains single, is supposed to be the wronged one here, but she comes off as whiny and immature. There is a romanticization of life as a couple of 20-something girls in late 1990s New York working for a music magazine, but it actually doesn’t seem like they’re having all that much fun. A bit mystifying why this book got good reviews.

The best part of this book is the second half, which was a sequel to the first. The first half depicts a middle-aged Parisian woman's affair with a late-teenaged boy, and the second half focuses on that boy/man after coming back from serving in WWI to a world that no longer makes sense to him. The writing is evocative but not flowery, unsentimental and sometimes scathing.

What even was this? A parable? A fairy tale? An allegory? Was it about religion? About artificial intelligence and how it can spawn its own superstition? This seemed to me a huge amount of world-building and excruciating detail just to say‚ what?