I had the misfortune of selecting to read two long books about dysfunctional families, filled with selfish people and religious undertones, at the same time, and The Latecomer was one of them. For people who love these kind of books that may be okay, but I'm better off consuming in small doses, otherwise the horribleness of the characters tends to get exacerbated for me. Such is the case with The Latecomer. The story centers around a couple that come together more out of convenience than anything else. Salo was never paid much attention as a child, and a deadly accident as a college student makes it even harder to snap him out of his own world. Joanna, meanwhile, is overlooked in a crew of siblings where one is an overachiever and the other an adored miscreant. She meets Salo under less than ideal circumstances and when the two marry, she becomes determined to have a brood of her own. When it finally happens via IVF she has triplets - who have no more interest in each other than their parents. Salo has checked out, obsessed with artwork and the affair he's been having for years. Joanna is overbearing. Harrison is a pretentious jerk (and I use jerk because more accurate descriptions would involve language less fit to print), Sally is disengaged and willing to wreck anything that gets in the way of her life, and Lewyn is insecure and overemotional. Needless to say, if you put all of these people in a room together, or heck, even two of them, things are bound to go badly. If you survive 350 pages of this, things do implode to disastrous effect. If you have in fact made it this far, you might finally start enjoying the story because Phoebe (the latecoming leftover cytoblast from the IVF experiment), who has not had the benefit of a family unit like her older siblings, decides that the one thing that is most important to her is to try and undo all the damage the rest of her family has done to each other over the years. This part is well done - Korelitz never makes Phoebe into a miracle worker, or an overly upbeat Suzie Sunshine. Phoebe plods away, hears things she doesn't want to hear, but in a simple, practical way browbeats her more closeminded family members into owning up to their mistakes and finding points where they can relate to each other. Unfortunately this feels like a small part of the overall story, and if I hadn't been reading for review I may not have managed to make it this far in the book to enjoy it.