Anna Karenina

Two lives, cut against each other for eight hundred pages. Anna walks out of a cold marriage and away from her son for Vronsky, and finds that Petersburg minds the openness far more than it ever minded the affair. Levin stays on his land, fumbles a proposal, marries Kitty, and cannot stop asking what the point of any of it is.

Tolstoy refuses to let the two halves settle into a lesson. He is savage about the etiquette that grinds Anna down and oddly gentle with nearly everyone working it, her humiliated husband included. The line about happy families has been quoted into meaninglessness, and the book under it is untouched by that. The passage where Levin spends a day mowing with his peasants and loses track of himself is where the whole thing cracks open.