I am not entirely sure what I mean by this but this is one of the most 1990s novels I could imagine. Other examples from American writers: Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, and basically any TS Boyle novels. This novel begins in the later 1800s and makes its way through the early 1900s and spends its whole length in New York City. Martin Dressler is a cigar-maker’s son, and when he’s […]