Early on, I was thrilled: I've never read a novel—nor even seen a story—about a professional woman navigating 1930s New York City alone before. And it opens on an intimate look at a woman who's cheating on her husband. “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” is surprisingly frank, surprisingly honest (this woman seems to really enjoy “the spectacle”, the show of it all, because it puts her in the director's seat) and is the story that turned me onto the novel. It contains no dialogue, which is actually really refreshing. Refreshing, that is, until you realize most of the rest of the book is written the exact same way. As the vignettes move onto less and less interesting subjects (notably ones that don't focus on our Margaret Sargent), most of which involve the 1930s socialist intellectual scene, the steady drumbeat of exposition told in the exact same sharply-written style grows rather tiresome, like that funny person you meet at a party who excites at first, but can't seem to ever go beyond one tiring note. Of the six vignettes, only two of them are worth reading (and one of them is about a 1930s Trumpian schemer.) But “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment” is such a great story, and the novel's subject matter: an intelligent woman who restlessly, compulsively?, moves from one affair to another without much shame is so unique (all the socialism stuff?; meh) it salvages the book. Two stars.