Change comes with time and patience and with repeated slips backward. Like a more internalized Iris Murdoch, Egan doesn't let a character abruptly graduate to peace, acceptance, comfort - she'll describe, e.g., a Zen moment that Phoebe experiences, and then slap her right back down into misery, the way real life works. One thing Egan does beautifully that I really appreciate is to not tie anything up neatly. By the end, Phoebe has shed a great deal of her naivite and bravely come to face painful truths about her family and her idealization of them and of the flower-child generation she just missed growing up in. One scene on the beach with the sisters and the dying father made me put the book down for a few days - the narrator's childhood memory was so real and painful. Started off a bit rough but it's smooth now, and quite vivid. Set in 1970s San Francisco and Europe, where the protagonist traces her sister's footsteps. Egan's freshman novel, about a girl who, along with her widowed mother, is frozen in time since the suicide of her hippie sister the decade before.
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