Ausubel's 2013 debut novel
No One Is Here Except All of Us was fascinating and unlike anything else I'd read.
Sons and Daughters is startlingly pedestrian, the story of Fern and Edgar, two exceedingly rich parents who abruptly lose their fortune. In the ensuing emotional chaos they temporarily abandon their children. The sad troubles of the privileged are not exactly groundbreaking literary material, and the abandoned-children plot line mirrors (in part) Hector Tobar's terrific and superior
The Barbarian Nurseries.
I still enjoy Ausubel's dreamy, fluid style and find sympathy with her characters. But I was startled yet again, as in Chris Cleave's
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, to find rich white characters befriending two-dimensional black characters to make those rich white characters...more sympathetic? Cool? In 2016?
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