Review by Tom Keech

An upper-middle-class Manhattan family vacations with two friends in Mallorca at a turning point in everyone’s domestic life. There is a lot of food shopping, cooking, eating, admiration of island vistas, swimming, sunning, sightseeing, and bad tourist driving, as well as middle-aged resignation, failure to commit, much-delayed flickers of maturity, and a small bit of sex. What there is not a lot of is plot. Nothing much happens during the first 200 pages of the story as the seven narrators gradually reveal their backstory. The outcome is pretty predictable, but it’s comforting to watch this smarter-and-richer-than-average family deal with the same kinds of problems that plague ordinary folk.