Andrew Ewell’s Set for Life has already met its deserved fate. The novel is doing as poorly as it should on Goodreads and has failed to impress professional reviewers. It’s heartening whenever mediocrity fails; to find the public and experts not only in agreement, but actually right, makes me hopeful about the future of American democracy. Set for Life would be more interesting if it were awful. Free of truly embarrassing passages, even in tone, never purple, caricatural, or unhinged, the novel is instead the sort of boring, easy-to-read fiction that only the steadily dimming aura of ‘literature’ differentiates from what’s served up in the streaming services’ slop troughs. We’re dropped into the plot on page one. A thus-far novel-less would-be novelist, our narrator-protagonist — overshadowed by his relatively prolific novelist wife — is returning from a fellowship during which he wrote nothing. Within a few pages he begins an affair with another unaccomplished, bitter writer, which inspires him to begin a new novel. Scenes move back and forth between Brooklyn and a college upstate, where the protagonist is the spousal hire and technical subordinate of his resented wife. The story combines several of the most familiar setups of modern literature: the campus of unhappy academic couples, the novelist not writing a novel, and the dissatisfied provincial who tries to blast life open with a doomed love affair.