Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was seduced by the myriad breathless reviews in The NY Times and similar, and dropped $23. I had been told that this was a life changing read, a searing and revelatory indictment of our times etcetera. Reader, I am mystified. I don’t usually set out to eviscerate the work of others as I haven’t written a novel myself. But I wondered repeatedly while reading this ( it only takes about 4 hours, as it’s very slight) what the definition of a novel is. Am I very regressive to imagine that there is supposed to be some element of plot? Even a very slim one? I became infuriated at the denial of any story. The book sits inside the narrow mind of a depressed and regretful woman, and meanders through all the reasons her life is confining and unfulfilling and hard now - nothing radical whatsoever, just the same miserable economic legacy America has handed to everyone under about 50 these days. We visit her fractured past friendship with a beloved girl, her obsession with that friend today, her job at a charter school, a little underdeveloped segue into hearing about a hint of #MeToo at her night school job. Our lead has mean affluent parents who don’t understand how hard it is to survive these days. She has two unnamed kids and a husband who are not developed as characters, and other people in her life who are just cyphers - they are called things like The Chilean Writer and The Twenty Four Year Old. What happens in this book? I hear you cry. Nothing. You’re just stuck in the head of the protagonist as she endures pretty low level awfulness. Credit cards bounce and she buys too many books and spends too much time namedropping and quoting famous authors. Meantime nobody copy edited this book. It’s exhausting to spot the typos. The tenses are all muddled up even in the first couple of pages. At the end.... it just ends. I think someone maybe blew out a candle at a kid’s party at the new apartment the mean parents paid for in the end or something. If anyone at all can tell me why this book is literary fiction I’m all ears. Emperor, clothes, missing.