Nom de Plume

I read all these reviews of Little Children a while ago. One person described it scathingly funny, another said she couldn’t stop laughing. Great, I thought, another heartrending comic materpiece like Franzen’s The Corrections. Put it on my to read list, and picked it up at the library day before yesterday.

Only I didn’t think it was so funny.

Oh, not that it was bad; it wasn’t. It was pretty good even. But while I enjoyed it, I didn’t find it the scathing indictment on modern American domestic life it was rumored to be. I just found it sad.

It centers around a two couples in a suburban town. Sarah, previously a militant feminist, has somehow become a mother in a traditional relationship. Her husband is obsessed with an online porn star. Then there are Kathy and Todd, he a stay-at-home dad trying to pass the bar for the third time and she a documentary film maker waiting until he can start bringing home the big bucks. Sarah and Todd embark on an affair. There are peripheral stories as well: the child molester who just moved to town and the retired cop who thinks its his duty to harass him.

All in all, as I said, it was pretty good. Not as good as other novels about domestic life written from a man’s POV, such as Chang-Rae Lee’s The Aerialist, or even Robert Inman’s Captain Saturday–but good nonetheless.

Just not terribly memorable.

However, it does prove to me that the current male authors who are most revered by the Literary Powers That Be usually write something that is termed one of three things: 1) “gritty and real”; 2) “a satiric indictment of modern (insert adjective here) life”; or 3) “a political tour de force.”