Why fate doesn't always cooperate

I'm sad right now. I just finished reading Sally Beauman's The Sisters Mortland, on loan from Carolline, and it's one of those books that makes me want to mope around until I something distracts from the fact that life doesn't always finish happily ever after.

That said, it's gorgeous, and haunting - even if sometimes a little too pat. The eponymous sisters are the center of the piece, even though a good half of it involves them as they are seen by others, particularly in the painting of the same name as the novel. Three stunningly beautiful sisters, who have fatal flaws and family secrets; and the young men whose lives intertwine around theirs, during the summer of 1967. And whose lives continue to intersect in increasingly complicated ways even 23 years later.

Beauman employs a writerly trick that I always fall for, and thus tend to resent. We see characters perhaps better than they see themselves, and then root for them to figure out what we've already deduced. Because we, as readers, want the happy ending. Or at least the satisfying one. Life is difficult enough - can't we at least believe in satisfaction, at the end of the day?