The major tropes of mid-century Jewish males in fiction were laid down by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, and given their death-knell satire by Woody Allen. It was a process that took about 20 years, from the publication of The Adventures of Augie March (1953) to that of Without Feathers (1972). Lenny Bruce's memoir How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1966) and Louis Zukofsky's long poem "A" (the first half appeared in 1959) figure in as less well-integrated extremes--outsiders. Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) is the Moll Flanders-like ur-text.

Bellow and Roth and Allen all had the same subject: the relation of a striving immigrant minority to an established middle, and especially upper-middle, class, in that class' intellectual and anti-intellectual versions.

The process--whereby model minority stereotypes are systematically smashed, replaced with full-blown people, and then caricatured--continues in fiction. Women writers now take the lead: Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, and Abha Dawesar, among many others, focus to one degree or another on the Bellow-Roth equation. (When Dawesar's That Summer in Paris was in pre-pub last spring, PW asked if she was, in fact, the Philip Roth of Indian Fiction.)

I recently picked up the galley for Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires. I flipped it over, and found the following on the back from Amy Einhorn (VP & EIC, Hardcovers, at Grand Central):

"An epic, page-turning American story of class, society, and identity, this debut brings to mind Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. It's that good."

Lee's book is actually a lot more ambitious than Goodbye, Columbus (1959). The protagonist is a Korean-American woman named Casey Han, who is the Ivy-educated, "unusually tall" first daughter of a Queens emigré couple, husband-and-wife managers of a Manhattan dry cleaning franchise. (Managers, not owners. One of the things that's so impressive about the book is the deft detail it goes into on such matters as how Korean owners of dry cleaning concerns hook, and keep, such couples as the Hans--down to the differences in pay between husband and wife, and how much of that money is kept on and off the books.) The book focuses on Casey's post-collegiate path in the wake of being disowned, but its scope is kaleidoscopic, and its scale is (as also promised on the back cover) very 19th century, with Lee flashing in and out of the heads of a very large cast.

(In order to breech 256 pages, a debut has to get through about a thousand editorial and marketing sentries. I have tried to think of a recent debut novel that, like Lee's, is 500+ pages, and the only thing that came to mind is Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which is a first-person novel.)

I'm not very far in to Free Food for Millionaires, which pubs in May, but it does seem like the Bellow-Roth equation, with its airings of dirty laundry, is very much in play. Here's part of a paragraph from page 33:

"She saw the girls first. [Dispassionate three-line description of boyfriend in three-way.] They looked liked girls she and Jay could have known from school, but prettier than Princeton girls. Casey scrutinized them. They looked happy--their faces flushed. A half empty bottle of red wine rested on Jay's Ikea desk. A year ago, he had borrowed his mother's car, and he and Casey drove out to Elizabeth to buy the desk and a pair of white shelves. They ate swedish meatballs in the store cafeteria. She and Jay had never had sex in this room and not on any floor in quite a while. His stereo was set to a Top Forties station, something he never listened to, and Casey was glad it wasn't radio station bang-bang because that was their joke. The song playing was "Lady in Red," and Casey focused on its maudlin lyrics and the rattling of the air conditioner--its chassis hanging out the casement window. They hadn't noticed her yet."

The whole time Casey is standing there, she has a mark on her face, from where her father has hit her, that is "less distinctly a hand--more liver shaped."

I thought of Portnoy.  I couldn't help it.