What do these books have in common?

“The principal subject of mainstream literary fiction today is the way we live now, meaning the way the upper middle class lives now.

If Raymond Carver was the master of the death of the American dream, Franzen is the chronicler of its ghostly persistence — the combination of economic growth with deepening insecurity.

The natural terrain of this generational struggle is college and life just after college, the setting of The Corrections and Freedom,but also of Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.”

The Literature of the Second Gilded Age by Stephen Marche