That's the funny thing about beginnings in the book: More often than not, they arrive fashionably late. So many of Makkai's characters are fickle and twistable, exposed to change as if to a high wind. It's easy to get lost in their remaking, to forget their old shapes and embrace them as new. Here, names are not so much anchors as tags, disposable tokens to be picked up and put down with the right amount of effort. In Makkai's telling, the world brims with reinvention, the next start almost as close as the next footstep. Even the book's prologue shows up in a spot you might not expect it.
This principle extends to Makkai herself. As a guiding hand, she's restless and, happily, always ready to indulge that restlessness. This is true not only of the book's structure, which opens at the end of the 20th century and leaps backward into the past at intervals. It's true also within each section, as her chapters shift weight from one character's perspective to the next. And she manages the changes subtly. I often found myself so convinced by the assumptions of a character that I'd take them for facts — at least, until the next chapter convinced me otherwise. It takes a special trick to remake the world without a reader noticing; it takes a tremendous talent to do it again and again.
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