Two new novels illustrate just how hard it is to find a foothold in America

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/ [login to see] /the-late-americans-such-kindness-review
"Many years ago, I got an email from a woman who'd been in graduate school with me. She'd read something I'd written about that experience and wanted me to know that she, too, had felt like a working-class interloper in the halls of the Ivy League. In fact, she told me that to augment their graduate student stipends, she and her then-husband delivered newspapers before dawn every day to make ends meet.

I thought of that classmate's hidden life all the while I was reading two powerfully disconcerting novels about making it — or not — in America".