Warning, spoiler. But there’s a moment in The Privileges when you realize that what you expect to happen just isn’t going to happen. And that the novel is about something else entirely, about the four “pillars” (as Dee calls them) of the family, and the type of house those pillars are holding up.
My favorite excerpt, from location 4450.
Each moment bore only on the next one and if you were going to be successful in this life, that was the plane on which you had to live. If you started going on your knees to the past, demanding something from it that it hadn’t given you the first time around, you were dead.
