Point of View

The novel is a short story cycle presented by an omniscient narrator who is not directly involved in any of the characters’ lives and never appears as a character. The narrator shifts the perspective, moving from the account of the weekend reunion to stories that focus on the tipping point moments in the emotional lives of ten of the reunion attendees. Like the iconic realistic novelists from the grand tradition of realism in the nineteenth century, writers such as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Honore de Balzac, O’Brien uses omniscient storytelling to reveal character with compassion and sympathy.

The narrator provides a broad moral frame around the storylines of the characters. In the stories about each attendee, the point of view maintains a tight limited perspective from that character’s point of view. In “Too Skinny,” for instance, the story about Marv Bertel’s...