Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Nine: The Hundred Year House

I have to admit, I couldn't finish this novel, which is Rebecca Makkai's second.  (I read her first, The Borrower, a little more than a year ago.)  The idea is cool--following the inhabitants of a large, mid-western house over the first hundred years of its existence.  The decision to invoke a sort of reverse chronology--the first part of the book happens during the end of the first hundred years, but within that section, the events are in chronological order; the second part of the book starts fifty years earlier but its events are also told moving forward in time, etc.--was rather strange, but it could have been really interesting if I didn't hate all of the characters so much.  But here's the thing: I did hate all of the characters, quite a lot.  They were sort of okay at first, and then instead of growing on me, I just came to loathe them, and I couldn't even respect any of them.  I did persevere through the end of part one (whose resolution I found unsatisfying), and I really felt the book could have ended there, but instead there were still two more parts.  I started in on the second, but once it became clear that these characters would be at least as disagreeable as the ones in the first part, I gave it up.  The plot and the setting had plenty of potential, it's just that I like to read books with more sympathetic characters.  It was well-written and had an interesting premise, but it just wasn't my cup of tea.