I have great difficulty understanding why this book has received such positive reviews. To me, it read like a very smart college student's first crack at a novel. Clean prose, impressive vocabulary, but without depth. I found the characters and situations to be flat and uninteresting. The main character is supposedly this very worldly, upper-crust pianist and I didn't believe it for a second. The whole thing fell flat. Read a few pages of the excerpt and see if you don't agree.