The Terror of Mediocrity

On Andrew Ewell's 'Set for Life'

Giorgio de Chirico, Gare Montparnasse, 1914, Oil on canvas

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.

Clever authors continually refresh genres and tropes one would think exhausted. Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution is a brilliant and surprisingly touching parody of the campus novel in which a bitter little busybody — modeled on Mary McCarthy, who had published the hilarious and vicious campus novel The Groves of Academe two years prior — tries to gather material for a novel at a Bennington-like college. Julie Schumacher’s imperfect but formally inventive Dear Committee Members, is a campus novel with an epistolary twist, told through a series of letters of recommendation.

That it is still possible to do something good and new, even this late in the day, with the old and limited materials on hand is always the wager of art. By combining so many stale setups in one plot, Ewell could have cast new light on, say, the obvious yet unavoidable stupidity of imagining that infidelity is interesting — a lesson our public philosophers keep teaching us by forgetting to learn. He could even have offered insight reviewers might take as politically valuable by showing how a straight white man is driven to transgressive, destructive acts in a bid for revenge against his wife, who is understood by the novel’s other characters to churn out unliterary but commercially successful crap.

A wife who fuses the types of girl boss and human resources manager, along with the culture industry she serves, has longhoused a sensitive middle-aged man, who must fuck and write his way to freedom. It’s a story that could speak to the boymen of Passage Publishing and the tenderqueers of Bookforum. Of course they would disagree on whether or not this guy is a despicable loser — their judgment of the character surely influenced by the widely-reported facts of Ewell’s own divorce from a more successful novelist. In writing Set for Life, in fact, Ewell hardly used any imagination, except that in the novel the seething protagonist manages by cheating on his wife to write a good novel.

I have no complaints about Ewell the man or Set for Life’s main character being bad people; writers and characters don’t have to be good for novels to be good. But sentences do. Set for Life is written almost entirely in clear, simple, straightforward prose that rarely strains towards lyricism and plods along with the competence of a recently updated AI. Take this paragraph from the second page:

My only succor was dinner in the city that night with our best friends from graduate school, John Reams and his wife, Sophie Schiller. We’d known one another almost twenty years, since long before anyone expected anything of us, when the future was still abstract with possibility. John had been a poet with a taste for bathos and sexual innuendo. Sophie had written short stories that combined the vernacular of her native Ohio with the gothic imagery of Flannery O’Connor.

This quickly gives us a sense of the two characters, and beneath the level of explicitness suggests that they are, like the narrator, losers. John’s poetry, horny and gushing, is not the sort of work that nowadays can get you a job teaching poetry at a university. Sophie’s fiction is similarly out-of-date and derivative — though the narrator, not attracted to talent, will soon put his hand on her leg. John and Sophie have given up on publishing, but hold to a despondent, half-articulated belief that their lack of success is proof that the publishing industry is set against real, impassioned writing.

They may be right about the book market, given the success of the narrator’s wife and her by-the-numbers novels. But we seem to know from the beginning that they’re fooling themselves if they think they’d succeed in a fairer, smarter, more earnest or tasteful, somehow better literary market, given their own backward-looking, tedious, simpering approaches to literature. They are, in their way, as small-souled as the narrator’s wife and the colleagues who encourage the narrator to just write something sellable; it being as cowardly to imitate classics as to appeal to an ignorant public.

Set for Life, as the passage quoted above shows, is an indictment of deluded writers; Ewell’s own prose is the product of one. Phrases like “the future was still abstract with possibility” are pointless — of course the future is possible; it hasn’t happened yet! And what would it mean for the future to no longer be “abstract”? These can’t even be called flourishes. The vague, wordy appearance of thoughtfulness, in which empty concepts are set one after another in a sequence going nowhere (future . . . abstraction . . . possibility), recalls the features of the worst sort of writing on contemporary art.

Ewell’s weaknesses are elsewhere in the mode of John’s poetry, with curlicues of an unmastered, old-fashioned fusty style slipping out from the clean, unscented lines of his MFA-trained prose. Take for example: “my father’s white panel van parked forever by the lobby door, its sides painted over with the names of aborted business ventures like a palimpsest of failed ambitions.” “Van parked forever by the lobby door” scans, a bit of iambic pentameter astray from a bad sonnet, while “aborted” and “palimpsest” are among the top fifty words overused to add drama to an otherwise dull description. In another echo of bad poetry from a previous century, a character “gazed gloomily across the room at him, looking tired and weary.” The alliterated “g’s” at least make a funny noise; the Biblical pleonasm — “tired and weary” comes from the Book of Isaiah and of course repeats itself — is just lazy.

The internal monologue of the narrator-protagonist enacts many features of the writing he seems to loathe. He acidly observes the cutesy signs hanging at the one decent bar in the small college town where he and his wife live: “IT ISN’T A HANGOVER, IT’S WINE FLU, read another one. THE UNEXAMINED WIFE IS NOT WORTH LEAVING was posted like one of Luther’s 95 Theses above the exit. I DRINK THEREFORE I AM hung behind the beer taps.” The protagonist imagines himself to be above Middle America’s stupid kitsch, its deliberately awful puns and cultural references, here to Socrates and Descartes and in reach of anyone who has ever heard of college. But his own comparison of the bar signs to Luther’s Theses is just as much an unfunny attempt at seeming quirky and educated.

Ewell almost seems in such passages to have written what might have been a masterful novel about someone who recognizes that there are many terrible writers in his life, without recognizing that he himself is one of them. A novel about a mediocre novelist who fumes at sellouts on the one hand and idealistic idiots on the other — at the bad writers who succeed and the bad writers who fail — could be the basis for a good novel, one that would chart a path beyond the false choice of anti-literary schlock commercialism or pseudo-literary retrograde romanticism.

Such a novel, if written by a very skillful author, could perhaps even be narrated entirely by the character of the mediocre novelist. This narrator would interpret his own life and the lives of those around him through the boring conventions of incompatible genres that he could neither choose among nor renew. He would speak and think by shifting among a repertory of tones and discourses that he could imitate but not enliven. Lacking imagination, without which freedom is impossible, he would believe himself to have seen through the delusions ensnaring others. His sterile, cynical, un-self-knowing cruelty would be a powerful indictment of literature’s perversions, and shock readers into amending themselves. Set for Life, however, is a mediocre novelist’s mediocre novel about a mediocre novelist, and indicts, above all, its own author.

Blake Smith is a historian and translator. He lives in Chicago.