Contemporary fiction lacks many things, but precocious children are not among them. Wherever one looks — from the work of Jonathan Safran Foer to that of Marisha Pessl — these overachievers are wielding their bloated vocabularies, quoting Heidegger, contemplating the void, and generally telling us what they — or just as likely, their authors — have been reading. Like overbearing Manhattanite parents, their creators feel obliged to subject their fictional progeny to a barrage of extracurricular activities. Such novelists — indeed, such parents — would appear to find their children not sufficiently interesting as children.

¶ 5:13 PM