I can't decide if this book is more pretentious or insipid. I'm 2/3 of the way through and it has been a fight to get this far. The only reason I didn't give up and get a new book last night when Mathilde flipped her car going 110 mph and it somersaulted and hit a cow and she walked away with a bitten tongue is that I had already been in bed for 45 minutes. People will try to tell you that Groff uses beautiful language. She does every once in a while, I guess. Mostly she uses it to write shit like

Her hands warming on tea looked like chunks of knitting a child had felted in grubby palms. Enough decades, and a body slowly twists into one great cramp, but there was a time once, where she had been sexy, and if not sexy, at least odd-looking enough to compel.
Through this clear window she could see how good it all had been. She had no regrets.
That's not true, Mathilde. The whisper in the ear. Oh, Christ, yes, there was one. Solitary, gleaming, a regret. It was that all her life she had said no. From the beginning she had let so few people in.
That first night, his young face glowing up a hers in the black light, bodies beating the air around them, and inside there was that unexpected sharp recognition, oh, this. A sudden peace arriving for her.

Do you like sentence fragments? Come get a whole damn book of them. Also, authorial interjections. Also, go read for more details of the utter inanity.