It takes until halfway through the book to understand what it's doing to ANY degree. Retrospectively, this book is excellent. While reading, I almost put it permanently down. The first section, without spoiling what's going on with it, is a good example of how not to start a novel compellingly. The end justified it for me but it won't for everyone.

If you enjoy reading a book that has CRAFT, give it until the third section before you decide whether or not this book has any. In my opinion, it does. In my opinion, it's not enough for a book to have only craft, but what this book ultimately achieves almost makes me change my mind about that.

This is a book mainly about wealth, especially its trappings; it is also gender/patriarchy; these are related. Its main asset, which again does not appear until about halfway through the book, is to comment on powerful and yet impotent men through the lens of the support offered to them by the (impotent and yet powerful) women in their lives. It is at least interesting and at best masterful, even if the ending is a little iffy for me. If I had written it I would have organized it differently, but maybe then it would have been a worse book. I will think about it for a long time.