The campus novel meets lad lit in Andrew Ewell's Set for Life, an exceedingly smooth debut narrated by an unpublished writer in crisis--actually, crises. And they're of his own making.
As the novel opens, the narrator, who goes unnamed, has flown back to New York after spending three months in France, where he had a writing fellowship for which he did little writing. Before returning to his successful-novelist wife upstate, where they both teach at a liberal arts college, he visits a couple in Brooklyn--friends since graduate school. The narrator sleeps with the woman--his best friend's wife, who is also his wife's best friend. Of apparent lesser concern to him than the fate of his marriage: in order to satisfy the conditions for tenure, he must produce "a single-author volume of no less than two hundred pages under contract with a national press by the time of promotion. So why couldn't I do it?" Readers will have an inkling. Likewise, the narrator's wife has him sussed: her agent calls her work in progress a "terrific spoof of white male angst."
Although Ewell isn't fully committed to satire, Set for Life keeps up a terrific running gag about the genre-fication of literary fiction and the increasingly commercially minded publishing world. As unsympathetic as the narrator can be, what will keep readers turning pages is the brute authenticity of his voice, which makes the novel go down as easy as the alcohol he guzzles without compunction or conscience. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer