Over at The Barnes & Noble Review, I review Brady Udall’s new novel, about a man with four wives and 28 children. Here’s how it starts:

In Reality Hunger, a self-described manifesto recently published to much chatter, David Shields argues that the conventional novel, with its contrived plot points and all-seeing authorial voice, is dying, and deserves its fate. David Shields, meet Brady Udall. In the tradition of John Irving and Richard Russo and dozens of other novelists whose work appeals to something in people that Shields either can’t or doesn’t want to understand, Udall writes unabashedly old-fashioned fiction. It’s stuffed, in the present case, with fallout from A-bomb tests, a frisky ostrich, births and deaths, and a family, “like so many overextended empires before it, coming apart along the seams.”

Read the rest here.