This is the kind of literary fiction I really enjoy; I picked it up because it was on the ToB longlist, and I'm glad I did.   The narrative skips all around in place and time, held together by the voice of the narrator, Amanda, a black author who has become enmeshed in the lives of Catherine, a black sculptor, and her husband Ernest -- whom Catherine periodically tries to murder.  Other reviews have done a good job of framing what the novel is about, and indeed, it is about those things, but what struck me the most is how indirect it is about it all.   Amanda talks about Catherine and Ernest, and about Catherine's friend Gilette, and about her own life, and all the pieces are there for the reader to put together how hard it is for a woman (especially a black woman) to create without the men around her either co-opting or flat-out destroying her work, or her ability to work -- but there is never a moment in which the women themselves are really able to articulate it directly.  It's just there, it's the water they're swimming in, and Amanda can simultaneously

know that she left her own husband and child in order to be able to live on her own terms as a writer, and still (from time to time) participate in the narrative where Ernest is a very kind, lovable man who is overly loyal to his mentally ill wife.  Men and children make women crazy in this book, and there are very few escapes other than violence, either towards the men and children, or towards oneself using the men as instruments so that one is 'right' to leave them.

   It is really well done, and I am very glad I read it, but it is a tight, grim, sad view of the world so I'm not sure if I will ever want to read it again.