The book is a heartfelt, charmingly profound American epic. At a breezy 113 pages, it charts pretty much the entire 20th century, through a series of interlocking lives. Early on, we meet Margaret, a redheaded, brutally poor preteen who leaves school to work in a Chicago slaughterhouse. When the male employees jeer at her, she retreats, in her thoughts, “To a place close yet distant, both here and not here; / Present, but untouched by doubt or by fear.”