Set for Life

Set for Life is a comic and tender novel about marriage, art, friendship and the stories people invent in order to become who they want to be. Its protagonist teaches creative writing at a third-tier college in upstate New York. He is heading home from a summer fellowship in France, where he spent three months in Bordeaux sampling the local wines and doing almost anything except work on his long overdue novel.

On the way back he stops in Brooklyn to see the closest friends he shares with his wife. John is a jaded poet turned lawyer with a shaky moral compass. Sophie is a fiction writer who once showed great promise, and she has a complicated past and a mysterious allure. While John is out reciting poems to Brooklyn coeds instead of preparing legal briefs, the professor and Sophie sleep together.

Rather than collapse under his failures as a teacher, writer and husband, he finds a strange sense of freedom taking hold. Perhaps the affair is the way out. It might spare him from Chet Bland, the department chair who keeps pressing him, from the gossip of his colleagues and the generational friction with his students, and from the embarrassment of his wife, Debra Crawford, whose rise as a novelist has been meteoric. The mess might even supply the raw material for a devastating novel that would bring tenure, money and fame, everything he needs to be set for life, if only he were the one to write it.

This is Andrew Ewell's debut. It asks who owns whose story, pokes fun at the fiction we make from our own lives and from other people's, and gives the phrase publish or perish a new meaning.