Prominent on Nick’s syllabus is Joan Didion’s famous essay “On Self-Respect,” whose original publication in Vogue one of his student finds “a little weird,” since fashion magazines are “mostly concerned with telling women - well, white women, really - how to make themselves appear pleasing to others.” Another suggests Didion is “a foot soldier in the mass genocide of native peoples” for referring to them as “Indians.” He’s in withdrawal from several different mental-health medications and teaching writing at New York University (where Ginder also teaches writing). The elder and more responsible, Nick, once, while working for his mom, made “not one but both Cuomo brothers cry.” He quit out of emotional and moral self-preservation. Nancy has two adult children, each struggling to detach from the commanding mother ship. Her following is devoted, if precarious even those who won’t vote for her - “because of, like, the market,” one investment banker explains - admire her fierceness and her consistent coiffure. Nancy is a Democratic congresswoman running to represent New York in the Senate, having inherited her seat in the House from her husband, Howard, after he died in a single-person car crash following a mysterious marital dispute. You can imagine it smartening up beach blankets from the Hamptons to Malibu, where people enjoy seeing their ilk knowingly mocked. Nominally about politics - the author is a former political speechwriter - it’s really a skittering satire about a fissured nuclear family that could be transposed to almost any other power industry. Ginder’s fifth book, “Let’s Not Do That Again” (another, “Driver’s Education,” was published in 2013), beckons readers right in once more with that warm, conspiratorial first person plural. This is the guy I want to sit next to at the wedding. “The People We Hate at the Wedding” (2017). For over a decade he’s also given great title: “This Is How It Starts” (2009). The novelist Grant Ginder is blessed with a byline so strong that it sounds like a nom de plume.

LET’S NOT DO THAT AGAIN By Grant Ginder 336 pages.

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