This novel tells the story of two friends, Agnes and Fabienne, in post-WWII rural France. I got swept up in Agnes’s story (the narrator), but for so much of the novel, Fabienne felt like too much a plot device. She’s that nihilistic character who does whatever she feels like it because YOLO or whatever, and veer dangerous close to MPDG territory. In the last few pages, the author tells us Fabienne was driven by “her exhilaration and her despair,” neither of which we’ve seen in the preceding 300 pages.