The Lucky Ones (not the movie)

Like Arlington Park, this Rachel Cusk novel moves from one character to the next, a bit like Richard Linklater's movie, Slackers. We move from the young pregnant woman in jail for something she probably didn't do to Martin, skiing in the alps with the woman's assistant lawyer, to the sister of a friend of Martin, etc...
It's all very gentle and, though a bit gimmicky, I like the puzzle aspect (Okay who will we follow next?) and the example it provides of the six degrees of separation theory (which I like). In this way we're given a sort of "short story lite" for those of us who balk at the choppiness of the short story genre.
This style does break down towards the middle of The Lucky Ones, though we cycle back to the first character in the end, and we're given instead certain "types". Mrs Daley is a horror--the mother of grown children with five or "I suppose six, now" as she says herself, reluctantly acknowledging the latest one. Mrs Daley could serve as a warning to the other mothers presented here, but they seem a long way off from her life, still in the bewildering years of staying at home with small children.
Cusk paints a grim picture of marriage and parenting. The few decent men are either dying or realizing too late what it means to be a good father. The women seem at a loss how to rejoin the world or make a place for themselves. The nastiest character is no help at all, saying to his wife, "All right then...you go and earn the money and I'll sit at home all day drinking coffee. I know which I'd rather do."
It's hard to believe this sort of character still exists in this day and age, but I suppose he does somewhere, even if those words are never spoken aloud.
This seems a very domestic book, but the characters are mostly interesting and the writing is nice.
I like this line:
"I lived in the square house up the potholed lane with my parents and my twin sister Lucy, and they loomed large in the flat landscape, which was so empty of obvious entertainment and where time passed slowly, laboriously, as though each hour were being manufactured by hand."

Doesn't that just describe a childhood's Sunday afternoon?