Tom Perrotta's Mrs. Fletcher

That didn't sound bad to Amanda.  "I like Victorian novels. At least I used to.  I haven't read one since college."
"They can be kind of daunting," said Eve. "I've been meaning to start Middlemarch for the past year or so. Everybody always says how great it is.  But it never seems like the right time to crack it open."
Amanda looked wistful.  "There's so much to read but all I do iis watch Netflix and play Candy Crush.  I feel like I'm wasting my life."
--Tom Perrotta, Mrs. Fletcher, Scribner, 2017

I did like Perrotta's previous book, The Leftovers (2011) --see my blog entry of June 25, 2014 -- but did not care for Mrs. Fletcher, a book that effectively makes fun of everybody in the suburbs:  the old, the young, the LGBT community, college students, blue-collar workers, the married, the divorced, the autistic, etc.  What happened between The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher was Perrotta's stint with Damon Lindelof (of "Lost" notoriety) on the HBO version of The Leftovers, which had an arbitrary structure --let's make it up as we go along--that made no sense and was only redeemed by the presence of the luminous Carrie Coon, also this year in "Fargo."

The attempts at humor in Mrs. Fletcher are unfunny and misanthropic.  When it come to the end, with the divorced Eve marrying a plumber and her college dropout son going to work as the plumber's assistant, it comes across as a parody (and neither plumber is named Lee).  Whether it is parody, a self parody (conscious or unconscious) or something else I will leave to Dwight Macdonald's successors (see his book Parodies, The Modern Library, 1960).  Perhaps it is just too typical of many contemporary novels, with its impoverished vocabulary, gratuitous sex and arbitrary plotting, as though Jane Austen had never lived.