The Post-Birthday World

This was exhausting...500 pages of a self involved heroine slogging through her boring life. The conceit is that a live-in couple in London have a friend they see every year for his birthday. The woman one birthday goes out alone with him and wants to kiss him, the narrative breaks into two threads, one where she kisses him, one where she doesn't and it's 450 more pages of the years that follow with the consequences for the characters. Michiko Kakutani from the NYT loved it I might add.
On top of this annoyance the author has the temerity to write in italics what I imagine are meant to be the character's imaginings of what one of the men is doing at that very moment. ARGGHHH...layer on layer of deception. This teeters perilously close to authors recounting character's dreams in books and expecting you to read them(I mean they're fiction and then they have dreams? Please.)...anyway this is something that WILL NOT BE TOLERATED by our heroine (me, in case you forgot.).
So don't bother with the book, but if you like the idea of the different paths our lives can take by chance I would say watch Kristof Kieslowski's Blind Chance or even that Gwyneth Paltrow film Sliding Doors. (the first hinging on catching or not catching a plane, the second (lower budget?) a subway.)This is probably where Ms. Shriver got the idea from.
Come to think of it maybe in a parallel universe somewhere I am not reading Post Birthday World and Michiko Kakutani is stranded on a desert island with only it to read...