"Like Zadoorian's earlier novels--The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, The Leisure Seeker and Beautiful Music--this new novel brims with wit, passion and soul."
--The Millions, one of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2020
" Zadoorian's] message--that as we get older, it's okay to reimagine our lives and maybe even sell out a little, as long as we stay true to our authentic selves--is earnest. And a side plot that takes Joe through some grand theaters of yesteryear, now dangerously decrepit, provides moments of genuine poignancy."
--Booklist
"Zadoorian's comedy of contemporary manners resonates by virtue of its introspective characters and depictions of the small moments in life that, taken together, have great significance. Piquantly titled chapters ('Out Come the Freaks') provide additional comic snap. Zadoorian's subtle, timely story hits the mark."
--Publishers Weekly
"Detroit in 2009 is depicted as a place whose glory days are behind it and whose future is uncertain. Ana and Joe are neither fortune-seeking gentrifiers nor grizzled veterans, and their need to find a specific place where they belong makes for some of this novel's most affecting moments... This novel's] empathy and lived-in qualities are both appealing."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Zadoorian's comedy of manners gently and lovingly mocks and ridicules a generation that has grown up on irony...Zadoorian's writer's heart, however, is too true to reduce his characters to caricatures. At their cruelest and most smart-alecky, their creator never loses sight--nor does he allow his reader to lose sight--of their essential humanity and the tender vulnerability lying beneath the shiny surface."
--Books in Northport (Dog Ears Books blog)
"The journey is classic Zadoorian, filled with lots of Detroit-iana, classic asides, and two heroes you can't help but root for."
--Boswell Book Company, staff pick by Daniel Goldin
"In The Narcissism of Small Differences, Michael Zadoorian writes with smart, skewering accuracy about relationships and midlife, about the costs of irony and complacency, and about how change comes for all of us, whether we're ready for it or not. Zadoorian's humor does that rare thing: packs a punch even as it moves us to sympathy and emotional connection. With Detroit as his steady muse and memory palace, Zadoorian is a writer of consequence in full command of his gifts."
--Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin
Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children, contrary to their Midwestern values (and parents' wishes). Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering--both in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.
Set against the backdrop of bottomed-out 2009 Detroit, a once-great American city now in transition, part decaying and part striving to be reborn, The Narcissism of Small Differences is the story of an aging creative class, doomed to ask the questions: Is it possible to outgrow irony? Does not having children make you one? Is there even such a thing as selling out anymore?
More than a comedy of manners, The Narcissism of Small Differences is a comedy of compromise: the financial compromises we make to feed ourselves; the moral compromises that justify our questionable actions; the everyday compromises we all make just to survive in the world. Yet it's also about the consequences of those compromises--and the people we become because of them--in our quest for a life that is our own and no one else's.
