Walker, husband to Jack (described as “Leo-lite”) is lumbered with what we might call – with apologies to Tolstoy – “ Anna Karenina-principle-lite”. Insights, when they come, are spelled out clearly. In this way, the Plumbs’ various money issues can just feel, well, a little cheap.

Reading feels like day tripping – living shallow in these lives which, for all their drama, never sharpen out of slightly suffocating cosiness.

In being almost tyrannically entertaining, nothing can ever really matter that much. The book feels like tourism in another way, too. There is a similar predictability in the choice of settings, which constitute a kind of sightseeing tour of New York City: here is Central Park looking lovely in the snow next the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station now let’s take a turn around the Museum of Natural History.

Their grins are wry, their laughs are self-deprecating and their every other action seems perfectly matched to the conventions of people in books and movies. Like characters in a Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis film, they are vivid, animated and ultimately anodyne. There is Melody, a downtrodden suburban wife and helicopter parent to twin teenage girls whom she tracks on an app nicknamed “Stalkerville” Bea, a once-feted writer who is now struggling to finish her long-overdue novel and Jack, an antiques dealer who, without his husband knowing, has taken out a hefty line of credit on their retirement cottage. When the other three siblings meet him for lunch to discuss this, they “unconsciously arranged themselves around the red-checkered tablecloth according to birth order: Leo, Jack, Bea, Melody”, which, like much of this novel, is both pleasing and egregiously expedient. The calamity that ensues is an expensive one. Well-oiled with booze and thoroughly amped on cocaine, he abandons his wife at a society wedding to seduce a teenage waitress he packs her into his car and speeds off, then with his hands on the wheel and her hands somewhere else, he closes his eyes for a second and crashes. Most irresponsible is Leo, the oldest, whom we meet in a widescreen, popcorn-crunching prologue.

The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney