I think this novel’s strengths are in Ruth's narration; the linguistic choices betray a sense of weariness and hurt at the expense of empathy that makes for an interesting, complex voice. This is made explicit in the book's opening: "I needed them to know that Eleanor was once in possession of valuable things she squandered, which she chose to squander. That is one of the difficult things about personality - in order to convey it effectively there is always that faint smell of acting that muddles things. I needed them to see me in a merciful light."

This is the heart of the novel, and Ruth's plight - a tension between her need for empathy, for a kind of absolution of any guilt around her daughter Eleanor's addiction, and her unwillingness or inability to extend that same courtesy and understanding to her daughter. Ruth is fleshed out and well-written. It's her story, not Eleanor's. The narration plays up her melancholy in its attempts to underplay it. She "very nearly [doesn't] care" and "approximates cheer," and bemoans the need to perform an identity pages before describing her daughter's appearance as "half crazed." She "bows her head a little, as if to show that any insolence [...] was just a case of mistaken identity" but goes on to blame her daughter for "introducing notes of sadness" into her life. When her granddaughter, now in her care, begins to eat, she is thankful "to have a child who doesn't punish [her] through food." The constant centering of herself, though understandably informed by her sense of familial abandonment, is callous.

Vague self-help principles are espoused by the same narrator that largely fails to see people facing addiction as people (including her memorable description of Eleanor and Ben as resembling "common frogs or [...] cartoon conmen"). It's a testament to Boyt that this dynamic doesn't exhaust the reader or turn them against the narrator. She pulls this off by voicing well-rendered, reflective turns of phrase through Ruth. For instance: "odd those times in life when telling the truth sounded like deceit" for instance, or "a sense [that] I was experiencing new things I had lived before, that there was no difference between the past and the present, or rather the differences seemed smaller than the similarities."

Of course, the narrator also spends chapters deriding appearances; of her street as a site for sex-workers to find clients, of her "friends" and their unworthy romantic interests, and of her daughter as she fights addiction. Her preoccupation with appearances likely exacerbates her own disconnect from her daughter. She pays lip service to it, and the text spends a great deal of time detailing her decor preferences and her need to maintain an outward-facing veneer, but she isn't always as conscious or critical of this aspect of herself as the reader might be.

I had a little more trouble with the dialogue throughout, particularly with her stiff-upper-lip friend Jean. Ruth is fleshed out, and her judgments of others are articulate but hollow, tainted by her pain and her insecurities. Outside of her granddaughter Lily, I didn't get any depth of character for anyone else, including (most problematically) Eleanor. This made for a tougher finish to the novel for me, especially as its pace accelerates in its latter half. But what do I know?