Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars (Novel). Joyce Carol Oates

I really  like  the novels of Joyce Carol Oates. I admire her ability to expose the tensions within a group of people who think of themselves as a community, whether they are members of a family, residents of a town, citizens of a nation or, as in this case, all three.

At one level the story is simple. The paterfamilias of a prosperous,  middle class family, acting on a decent impulse,  intervenes in a situation on which he has stumbled. A spiral of conflict ensues: brother against sister, children against mother, conventional family against the civic order.

This is one of those novels where you find yourself having one-sided conversations with the characters:  "Oh for Christ's sake!  Don't do that!  Can't you see where it will lead?"  In that sense, as in many others, it is a faithful portrait of the contemporary United States.