No such thoughtfulness greets Gretta's sensitive, guilt-prone first-born, Michael Francis, when he trudges home from his dreary job teaching history. After a shotgun wedding, he had to abandon his Ph.D. studies and dash his dreams of a professorship at an American university. Now that their second child is ready to start school, his wife, Claire, who's barely talking to him, is paving the way to her liberation by studying to complete her long-abandoned degree. Michael Francis is distraught at the thought of losing her.
O'Farrell piles on the misery in this section of the novel, though Monica, 10 months younger than her brother, is too peevish and self-righteous to arouse much compassion. Her first husband left her after a rude discovery of just how determined she was not to have children. Now she's terribly unhappy in her new country life, married to an older antiques dealer whose two small daughters treat her with disdain.
O'Farrell's sympathies generally lie most solidly with black sheep — or rather, black ewes. As such, Aoife (pronounced like Eva with an F sound, we're told) is the bleating heart of the novel. Ten years Monica's junior, she had, in her mother's words, "gone off the rails" and "flounced" to New York City three years earlier after a major falling-out with her sister. This defection capped a miserable childhood blighted by undiagnosed dyslexia. Enthralled with her freedom from family censure, Aoife has managed to support herself by working multiple jobs, including the first she's ever loved, as a photographer's assistant. But her carefully hidden illiteracy threatens her job and a serious budding romance.
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