In this novel, which takes place in a thinly veiled Soviet Union, one family and a community spend a year waiting on line for tickets to a concert by a thinly veiled Igor Stravinsky. The novel has great promise as an idea ; it would have made a brilliant short story. After The Change (the revolution) people are still waiting for the cherished ideals the regime promises. They have to wait for everyday items as they wait for their brave, new life, just at the end of the metaphorical line. But in a novel of over 300 pages, the line is not slack. There is only so much that can happen to keep up the engagement of the reader. Certainly the predictable arc of the story with respect to those waiting in the line--confusion and anticipation; excitement and new discoveries, new relationships; strain and obsession, leading to tensions and fraying relationships; wisdom, rekindled love strengthened family relationships, community forged, people's lives more valued than concert tickets--doesn't help. 

This book is set in a thinly veiled Soviet country, about half a generation after The Change, which is clearly a communist takeover of some kind. One day a line appears in front of a kiosk. The kiosk is closed, and no one knows what it sells when it's open, but people's lives are so bleak and empty that they stand in the line not because they want whatever it is that will be sold, but because the line is a symbol for some future good, of the hope that someday something worth having might be available to them. 

The book focuses on one particular family: an estranged husband and wife, the wife's mother, and their teenage son. The husband and wife and mother all remember life before the change, and grieve at what was lost, but the son is too young to remember what the alternative kind of life might be, and so struggles with an aimless dissatisfaction with the future he sees open to him, without knowing in any real sense what other kind of future he might build. 

All of these people have reasons for standing in that line, and the first third or so of the book focuses on their internal lives, their unhappinesses, their dissatisfactions and feeble attempts to make their lives better, all revolving, one way or another, around standing in this line.

It is a bleak, empty, unhappy book about bleak, empty, unhappy people. Maybe they'll be able to make things better in the second half, but if so I won't be here for it. I don't want to spend any more time in that world.