LRB · Benjamin Kunkel: Men in White

…there is, after all, just the one world or, for the individual, the one life. We also know that originality, in realist fiction, comes not only from capturing what’s historically new but also from correlating novelty with persistent inherited ways of acting, thinking and feeling. But the challenge posed to fictional representation by even the most ordinary contemporary life in New York City (or anywhere similar) may not yet have been met.

Anywhere similar… the London in David Szalay’s LONDON AND THE SOUTH EAST (see more @ amazon)? A small life unconnected to what Kunkel calls ‘finanicalisation’, MBA cosmopolitanism and technology, but certainly contemporary.

More?