Ninth Post: “A little old for a first-time novelist”

I haven’t even finished the article yet, but yes!:

What distinguishes the book from most debut efforts is the grandness of its ambition. It’s a first novel that wants to read like the work of someone at the peak of his career, and it has an almost Dickensian amplitude — overamplitude, some critics may say — of subplot and detail; it’s one of those novels that strive to be much more than the sum of their parts, and in which the writing is not always averse to showing off a little.