Back then, I was thinking about the trends in “millennial” fiction, all those excavations of the souls of young educated women in deadening jobs and demeaning relationships. For a while, it felt (and sometimes still feels) like every new novel was some variant of this — the job typically in publishing or some other “creative” industry, the boyfriend either married or noncommital, the sex kinky but somehow unappealing. The absurdities of social media supplied a layer of ready irony.