Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
What is the goal of this book? What is its thesis?
You might argue "it does not need to have a thesis or goal, it merely needs to be true" — but this book clearly was not strongly interested in truth. Events are re-arranged and embellished for narrative convenience; characters are diminished into caricature.
Which arrives at what I think the goal of this book is, which is to be entertaining. There's nothing wrong with that goal, but — I didn't find the book entertaining! It felt...sneering and ungripping, except with its depictions of the Savannah landscape, which I desperately now wish to visit.