This book started frustratingly slow - you know something terrible is going to happen and you just want to get it over with, enough with the wool gathering. But it all forms a full portrait in the end, how people can be so strong of character and of body yet emotionally weak, terribly, catastrophically weak. More common in that earlier generation, I think; I recognized echoes of some of my own family‘s hurts in the tragic arc of the Mulvaneys.