Let me ignore the car angle in this saga of the Ford-like Onyx car dynasty, with car inventor and can-do man Tom Bridger; his half-brother Hugh permanently scarred by a car fire (was it Tom’s fault?); Tom’s passionate love Antonia (will die early) that he fails to marry only because of one letter is cut in pieces and not read (never do that!); Tom’s illegitimate son Justin who is into unions to spite his capitalist family (imagine the conflicts!) and whose Jewish wife Elisse will have to pay the ultimate price; Tom’s pedestrian wife Maude; and a bunch of dynasty children that are usually half-siblings prone to debilitating temptations of half-incest: ‘From the time that Zoe was twelve and he fourteen, this worship of unconsummated flesh had kept him from other girls who were most certainly willing to go all the way.’ Characters here are not either good or bad, but usually torn and conflicted, so this could be said to raise the handling of the book’s cast above that in another sprawling 1982 family saga by Sidney Sheldon, Master of the Game, where we have the good twin Alexandra and the bad twin Eve. There is something amazingly stilted and cumbersome about the language with its struggling metaphors: ‘His tears were not exactly grief but a mournful farewell, the lachrymose equivalent of a final taps sounding for the youth and joy he had possessed vicariously through his brother.’ At times, these turns of phrase give cause to interesting speculations, as when we learn that, ‘as Zoe swam into puberty, her emotions swerved onto the shoals of sex;’ and let me quote what happened on these shoals: ‘She would awaken breathless, her shapely thighs clenched together, heiress to a legacy of libidinous dreams in which Hugh caressed her budding breasts and her private orifices: those dawns she learned a manipulative technique she called “going up and over,” and Hugh's image remained the simulacrum on which these self-seductions balanced.’ Ever since I have wondered how exactly ‘going up and over’ is done. Is that a thing?