Andrew Gelman reviews Erin Somers

I think Somers does a much better job than Updike in conveying what it feels like to be a parent. To me, Updike, like Philip Roth, was to the end of his life always a son, never a father. Updike did have four kids, but I guess his wife did most of the parenting. Updike’s characters often have children but always seem to be thinking only about themselves. Not so much that his adult characters are self-centered–I mean, yeah, they are, but that’s kind of the point–but more that their children don’t seem to exist at all, except to the extent that they sometimes have to be dealt with as obstacles when they get in the way of the parents. In contrast, the adults in The Ten Year Affair are very aware of their kids. In some ways this is similar to Little Children by Tom Perotta, a book whose entire theme is that these adults are thinking only of themselves and are not shouldering the responsibilities of parenthood.

The children in The Ten Year Affair are real people, but they don’t come to life as much as, say, the children in the novels of Meg Wolitzer. Wolitzer achieves an equality across generations that I rarely see in literature; perhaps it has something to do with her being a Boomer, coming from a generation in which kids are central.

That’s from a review by Andrew Gelman, the statistician, who is one of my favourite literature bloggers. (He also gets named-checked in Helen DeWitt’s short stories, which are all about data visualisation and coding in R and so on.)

I also found The Ten Year Affair very readable, and though I didn’t admire it as much as Gelman or some others I felt I enjoyed it more than I realised. What jumped out to me was not the control of point of view but the moments (I assume intentional) of what seems like inverted Free Indirect Style. From my review:

Cora thought about her interactions with Sam so far. She felt possessive of him. She thought Eliot and Sam would get along. She could picture their pleasant, dick-swinging camaraderie. The way they’d know common people from the schools they’d attended. The way they’d bond over totems of millennial soft masculinity: craft beer and Knausgaard and basketball and socialism.

Whose phrase is “totems of millennial soft masculinity”? It might be an example of Free Indirect Style from Cora, but it is too generic; really, we feel this is drawn not from Cora’s consciousness, some perspective in the novel that is distinctly hers, instead, this feels like Somers, or some version of Somers’ Twitter personality, which, as with all Twitter personalities, is derived from the common stock: as with jokes, social media aphorisms take forms and modes that are inherently anonymous. Totems of soft millennial masculinity is such a phrase. This is an inversion of Free Indirect Style—ventriloquising discourse from outside the novel, which is relevant to the characters, rather than ventriloquising discourse from inside the characters that is relevant to the novel.