The premise is just too broad -- crude and adolescent. The details with which she draws her character -- the hair, the wife, the tan -- feel overblown and cartoonish. There’s no room for subtlety or irony. On page two, when the candidate announces that he wants to build a beautiful, classy wall across the southern border and have the Mexicans pay for it, I scribble in the margins 'satire demands a lighter touch.'

We were called up, one after another, and allotted two minutes each.  They sat in front of us, mostly late-middle aged, mostly female, presumably Jewish, all of them with reading glasses and notebooks—the scariest possible bar mitzvah crowd, deciding whom to invite to speak to their particular audiences, in San Diego or Palm Springs or Shaker Heights.

The Cookbook Collector’s literary elegance is part of what made the book invisible to a broad public, while Franzen’s roaring crassness is part of what made his book such a smash.  He’s just a lot louder than she is.