I think they liked it?

• “19th-century realist”

• “even as he condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and vanity to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.”

• “not Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of “hard” (shameless, ambitious brutes) or “soft” (pathetic, sniveling doormats)”

• “But it is neither this heavy-handed leitmotif nor the twisty, Dickensian plot”

• “threatening to turn them into authorial pawns subject to simple Freudian-Darwinian imperatives.”