'Saturday'

This is a pretty shitty novel.

It's full of flaws. I particularly can't behind a story where everyone is seemingly perfect: The brain surgeon dad, the lawyer mom, the poet daughter, the poet father-in-law and the brilliant blues musician son.

They're all rich. They buy skate heads to put in soups. They drink gin. Who the hell plays blues anyway?

Then there's the backdrop of the war in Iraq and all the back-and-forth that anyone with a harebrained opinion can talk and debate about for hours on end.

Are we to believe that this family isn't perfect? That our friend the neuro surgeon can't win a game of racquetball and that he causes a wreck on a street that somehow he has problems?

And how does the war fit into this scene? And what father stands by to watch a home invader make his daughter strip to -- we assume -- to rape her?

Who are these people?