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Meanwhile, across the Charles River in Jamaica Plain, the formerly working-class Boston neighborhood that stands for the authenticity so lacking in cosmopolitan Cambridge, Nora's lesbian friends try to warn her about the manipulative couple. But Nora is obsessed, and nothing can stop her implosion. By the end of the novel, you may be thinking good riddance -- to Nora and her halting, digressive, precious way of thinking. Although Messud is an admirable writer in many respects, Nora strains credulity. Ostensibly a third-grade teacher, she thinks like someone who writes literary fiction. Consider her reaction when Sirena brings her a gift from Paris: "I, like the yellow fat around the foie gras as I scooped it out of the jar, was positively deliquescent." In Messud's fictional world, Nora and Sirena occupy opposite ends of a character spectrum that runs from pathetic self-abnegation to pathological narcissism. Unfortunately, neither one is much fun to be with.
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