Some years ago, Tablet, a Jewish online magazine for which I was once a frequent contributor, ran a series of articles considering the parallels between the experiences of American Jews and Asian Americans: success, assimilation, complaints about quotas at Harvard as well as a habit of annoying Anglo-Saxons with a striver mentality, hunger for status, and frustrating dedication to all the external signs of a now-vanished WASP elite (the house in Connecticut, the perfect sweater) without cultivating its dedication to the appearance of ease, poise, and discretion or the maintenance of a low speaking volume in restaurants.

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.