In his review of David Gilbert’s novel & Sons for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mark Athitakis called it “a big, fat novel that’s a commentary on big, fat novels.

“It has a great man at its center: A.N. Dyer, an aging author whose style mashes up John Updike, Philip Roth and John Irving,” Athitakis wrote.

“The novel also celebrates the power of words—Gilbert invents swaths of Dyer’s prose, which is stylistically distinct from his own. But Gilbert also exposes the shallowness of those words,” he adds, and “it often feels like a postmodern novel in realist drag.”

Coincidentally, Gilbert’s first novel, The Normals: A Novel (2004), focused on a Harvard-educated protagonist. Photo: David Gilbert.