The Divorce Revolution Comes to Suburbia

Great domestic novelists, like Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, routinely create such witty and poignant worlds that readers risk growing accustomed to their genius. It’s an irritating critical response endured, I suspect, more by women writers than by men. Succeed long enough in the realm of family fiction, and the raves curdle into weary familiarity, embroidered with condescension.