Caldwell on DeWitt

Excellent review by Edmond Caldwell of Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods in the Chicago Review:

In the unsparing light of Lightning Rods, the contemporary novel of psychological realism stands revealed as a patchwork of readymade materials—clichés and slogans, the hoariest sententia and newly-minted banalities made “original ” by the unspoken complicity of all parties involved to find each particular identikit combination worthy of suitably breathless blurbs. DeWitt’ s “bad" book makes a joke of all the agents and editors, marketing and publicity departments, booksellers and book reviewers, and readers who take genuinely mediocre works for good coin. Jonathan Franzen’ s Freedom is no less a howling absurdity than Lightning Rods ; the difference is that one of them knows itself as such.