A good, old-fashioned character-driven novel: Wish You Were Here

Stewart O'Nan's "Wish You Were Here" is, from first day (100 pp.) into it, a really good, old-fashioned, gossipy, character-driven story - it would probably make a good miniseries, by the way - essentially about a 60ish woman, Emily, recently widowed, who heads off with her in-law (husband's sister) and dog to spend a last week at the family vacation home, which they're about to sell; Emily is joined by her two children and their families - so we're getting together by my count 9 people and 1 dog, each with his or her own problems and issues (daughter going through nasty divorce, son recently lost his job and is trying perhaps vainly to establish himself as a photographer) - book divided into sections by day - and within each section we move about among the points of view of the various characters, though all told through the voice of an omniscient third-person narrator; the first section of the novel, the Saturday on which all arrive at the summer place in upstate NY near Chatauqua, has a lot of work to do establishing each of the nine characters - and it takes a while for us to get grounded and to keep each one straight - but O'Nan is a very sure-handed guide, his writing is clean and richly detailed without being overwhelming or stylized. He's one of the writers who has the greatest capacity for entering into the consciousness of others - his novels cover a very varied terrain and often focus on central characters who are quite different from O'Nan himself.