In my opinion, Katherine Anne Porter is one of the best writers America ever produced, why she doesn't get brought up more often is beyond me. She also, in my experience, has the habit of sometimes producing work that's stunningly bad. And this, her only novel, was, by many credible accounts, supposed to be particularly stinky. By its critical reputation you wouldn't know that it was the number-one selling book in the year of its release, or that they turned it into Vivien Leigh's final big screen appearance, or even that it had been eagerly anticipated: Porter spent twenty years teasing a forthcoming novel after publishing very highly regarded short stories and novellas in the 30s and 40s, only to drop a 500-page brick in everyone's laps one year before Thomas Pynchon published his first book. So is it really that bad? Well, if you consider that the book juggles 49 characters (according to the opening list), that none of them are particularly pleasant (which is a bit of an understatement—the only instance of a main character behaving positively happened on page 312, I noted), that the opening exposition didn't seem to end until you were nearly 200 pages in, that the disorienting, episodic style and the density of the prose can make you feel like you actually were facing only day 3 of a crawling, interminable 30-day boat trip across the Atlantic, then it's a small wonder that I didn't think the book was really all that foul: the first two chapters (pp. 1-360) actually take you to a pretty thrilling place—at some point in the middle of the book you learn that most of the German passengers are anti-Semites, and there are only two passengers on board with strong Jewish ties. In fact, I thought the book's many-colored threads were forming an intriguing (nasty, bitter, trembling) harmony as they were being pulled taut, and that I might actually be reading some sort of overlooked classic. It's in the final, third chapter where the fragmented structure starts to feel more like a soap opera, the experimental thrill starts to feel like cheap tricks, the empathetic, complex, maddening characters start to feel more like flat, baffling cartoons, the meticulous arrangement of the sprawling cast starts to feel sloppy, and the events start to feel contrived. Even the big, climactic gala lands like an undercooked farce. If you got the sense that any of the race, class, moral, romantic, political, religious, or societal issues explored were ratcheting up into something worthwhile, they never do. And if you wanted to witness the kind of well wrung brilliance you saw in Porter's earlier work, you only get it here in scattered patches. Really, what you're left with is less of a novel and more of a 500-page encyclopedia cataloging vile and sundry human cruelty. In that sense, I can recommend it, but unfortunately only in that sense. Two-thirds of a great novel is, sadly, a bad novel. Two stars.