The proclivity to leave home behind and establish oneself in a European city has long existed within America’s upper classes. For generations, the European rumspringa was the gold standard in the development of any would-be American intellectual or moneyed cosmopolitan, a fact attested to by the reams of “Expat Lit” sent back across the Atlantic over the years. Popularized most notably by Henry James, novels detailing the lives of emigré Americans in Europe became the form of choice for dozens of our best writers, from Ernest Hemingway to James Baldwin. In the pre–World War II era, the United States existed decidedly in the shadow of the major European powers in terms of both cultural and economic influence. As such, the bulk of prewar Expat Lit concerns Americans arriving in Europe as cultural underdogs attempting to enter the established circles of their new homes (usually France) in the hopes of attaining recognition and success. For James, as for many of his characters, this was an incredibly difficult task, and his failure to establish himself within the Parisian milieu resulted in serious distress.

By the 21st century, the European sojourn had faded in importance for America’s literati thanks to the United States’ status as the cultural hegemon of the new world order; most writers no longer felt compelled to prove their sophistication by moving abroad when New York was quickly becoming the new nerve-center of world literature. Yet despite the absence of this original motivator, Americans have steadfastly continued to write about their European misadventures, ushering in something of an Expat Lit renaissance in recent years. If James’s and Hemingway’s Europe was an indomitable fortress of cultural legitimacy waiting to be penetrated, the Europe of this new class of Expat Lit authors—Ben Lerner, Elif Batuman, and Lauren Oyler come to mind—is something more like a fucked-up playground. With nothing by way of writerly credibility to prove, decamping to Europe is, for the contemporary American, less a necessity and more an opportunity to temporarily escape the bloated beast of alienation, isolation, and ahistoricity that is postmodern America in search of a more authentic, more historically cognizable, and altogether more fun lifestyle. Unfortunately, the expat’s chances of success in such a quest are far from certain in today’s Europe, something the protagonists of Something Rotten, Andrew Lipstein’s new contribution to the genre, end up knowing all too well.

Lipstein’s Americans are Reuben and Cecilie, a couple—co-parents but unmarried—who escape their millennial New York existence for a long visit to Cecilie’s native Copenhagen, their infant son Arne in tow. The novel alternates perspectives between the two with each chapter, detailing their arrival in Denmark and their respective adjustments to their new (or old) home. At its outset, we find the pair in a state of personal and career turmoil of the kind possible only for people of a very specific demographic in a very specific, very contemporary time period. Cecilie is a reporter at The New York Times who, while successful, finds herself working backbreaking hours, leaving her little time to attend to her son or partner (the family’s trip to Copenhagen comes only after she has postponed her maternity leave for a year), all while feeling that her accomplishments are overlooked by her superiors. Reuben, on the other hand, has found himself a few years into an “extended leave” from a high-powered position at NPR, which he was asked to take after accidentally having sex with Cecilie on-screen during a Zoom meeting (which he insists he thought he had left). They are archetypes of figures who haunt our current society, the overworked laptop warrior and the canceled media man, truly the quintessential couple of the 2020s.

By the time they arrive in Denmark, both Cecilie and Reuben have reached a nadir of self-confidence. Cecilie feels enslaved by the American culture of career obsession, which manifests as a persistent fear of her milk drying up and a newfound jealousy of her female friends in Copenhagen, whom she sees as more complete women. Similarly, Reuben feels his sense of authority—and masculinity—slipping from his grasp as a stay-at-home dad with negligible career prospects, made all the worse by his incompetence in navigating the Danish culture, language, and social scene into which he has been dropped. Adding insult to injury, he soon finds himself in uncomfortable proximity to Cecilie’s cool Danish ex-boyfriend Jonas, driving home his feelings of impotence and cuckoldry; diehard Freudians might point to Reuben’s sudden vaping addiction and accompanying oral fixation as their particularly contemporary expression.

Reuben’s crisis of self becomes the plot’s most animating concern in a manner typical of the genre. In the absence of any real physical danger (since these neo–Expat Lit novels tend to take for granted the safety, even comfort, that their characters will find in their new homes), most of these emigrés’ problems come from the internal chaos induced by their encounters with a different way of life. Indeed, the safety and banality of their new environs often prove the perfect catalyst for their neuroses, such that minor details take on outsized significance—in Something Rotten, Reuben’s alternating obsession with and disgust at the uniformity of Danish homes spans several pages.

What sets Something Rotten apart from many of its peers, however, is a certain lack of irony in its narrative: While it treads familiar ground with the navel-gazing crises of gender and identity that account for the bulk of its substance, the novel is less interested in explicitly skewering these concerns than it is with carefully studying their progression. Rather than satire, what we get is something closer to a comedy of manners intensely focused on masculinity and its discontents. For Lipstein, it is not a foregone conclusion that there should be anything about the expat experience worthy of ridicule.

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From the outset of their trip, Reuben finds himself on the periphery of Cecilie’s large and tightly knit group of friends, further exacerbating his feelings of inadequacy. He speaks a little Danish (a few “conversational set pieces”), but far from enough to bridge the gulf between native and foreigner at the Danish social gatherings in which he repeatedly finds himself. These glamorous Danes, mostly successful media professionals themselves, all speak English with a frustratingly effortless proficiency, but this only makes it worse; for the outsider, the nonspeaker, the Danish conversation merely excludes, whereas the English conversation actively panders. With Reuben thus positioned as the unwilling and humiliated American voyeur to Cecilie’s Danish world, he yo-yos between a deliberately postured aloofness and a painfully intense desire to fit in that, in some of the novel’s funniest passages, manifests as a reckless abandoning of his dignity and self-awareness. In his readiness to obey even the most mean-spirited whims of Cecilie’s friends at the drop of a hat, he even shaves his head and submits to an unfortunate tattoo in a childish attempt to prove he can hang.

Cecilie’s Copenhagen crew is fairly balanced in terms of gender, but in Reuben’s eyes, the objects of fascination are the men—just as Henry James’s novels exhibit an almost obsessive curiosity toward the social modes and mechanisms of French society, so too does Lipstein’s toward those of the Danish masculine experience. Despite the century that elapsed between the two authors, the extent to which European society is so clearly a near-fetishized object of jealousy in Something Rotten shows that perhaps Americans haven’t been able to adjust to our supposed global cultural hegemony as much as the ubiquity of our TV shows, films, and music might suggest. What Reuben encounters in this circle of Danish men is, in his eyes, an environment where manhood can be freely expressed and experienced in all its crude, problematic glory—an environment his enlightened, progressive New York existence never afforded him: “How desperately he wanted to understand them, wanted to be able to chime in, to be spoken to again, be considered by these men who thought nothing of him, who made cunnilingus jokes, whose interactions were so straightforward and impolite.” Reuben becomes increasingly enamored with these men, especially Mikkel, the charming and unpredictable editor of a notable Danish paper whom the group has chosen as its de facto leader. As they all grow accustomed to Reuben’s constant presence, Mikkel begins to take a genuine interest in him, validating the American’s precarious self-image by confiding intimate and, as it turns out, politically dangerous secrets in him.

The novel retains a focus on the pair’s new friendship as its plot stakes rise to a somewhat jarringly high level: In an unexpected genre shift, Something Rotten enters into the territory of the political thriller as Reuben becomes an unintentional pawn in Mikkel’s plan to bring down a far-right Danish politician in a coordinated media attack and Jonas receives a shocking yet suspicious diagnosis of a terminal brain condition. Yet even with the introduction of more dire stakes, there remains the sense that Something Rotten is, at its core, a novel of ideas, that its ultimate fascination doesn’t fully reach beyond its characters’ socially diseased interiority.

Lipstein’s greatest strength is his acute awareness of the deep sense of banality and emptiness that pervades so much of the lives of his yuppie-millennial characters. Both Reuben and Cecilie, despite their emotional turmoil, are incredibly well-versed in analyzing their feelings through a lexical arsenal of therapy-speak buzzwords that transform their internal monologues into cacophonies of endless mediation, distancing the self from its own object of reflection: “She needed to chill, she decided”; “He believed his obsequiousness could be mostly fixed by minding his talkativeness”; “For the first time he felt that he was actually gaining perspective, that he could appreciate the situation and his place in it.”

This narrative mode makes for a precise social critique, capturing the gulf between emotion itself and the mediated, practiced recognition thereof in a deliberately sanitized monotone, yet it often feels at odds with the gravity of the situations Lipstein introduces. The contemporary tendency toward constant self-reflection is one that can entrench itself only in a society abundant in time and safety; only in a world where people have the money, leisure, and energy to curate and obsess over their online images could such a fragmentation of one’s self-relation develop. As such, in the presence of something so immediate as death or danger, there arises a certain dissonance between form and content. This isn’t to say that Something Rotten fails to develop any drama outside of its protagonists’ interior emotional processing—its most touching moments come when the dam of self-observation bursts and they are finally forced to accept physical agency—but given how deep in their own heads Reuben and Cecilie are, this works best in small steps. Seeing Reuben overcome his fears and finally contact his absentee father feels like a quiet but real victory; seeing him compelled to choose whether to reveal a secret that will change the course of Danish history feels unearned.

The inability to reach beyond the quotidian isn’t unique to Something Rotten. The failure to escape the banality of self-obsession in favor of a more thorough and mediated understanding of the outside world is characteristic of almost every neo–Expat Lit novel. Some are more aware of this defect than others, yet almost every contemporary author working in the genre has discovered in one way or another the difficulty of telling a truly exciting story about middle-to-upper-class millennials moving to a European city. This isn’t exactly surprising. Unlike the first generation of Expat Lit authors, whose European lives were dominated by the excitement and allure of these enviable circles of high culture just waiting to have their boundaries tested and their norms challenged by a plucky young outsider, the contemporary American expat is protected from any real challenges by the knowledge that theirs is the dominant culture, that there’s nothing they could possibly need to learn by leaving home.

This is likely to change in the coming years, as America’s dominance, at least culturally, is sure to emerge from the second Trump era damaged and denuded. Perhaps the placelessness and misdirection visible in so many of these novels, like canaries in a coal mine, point toward an emergent condition, one of exhaustion, anger, and anxiety. As dissonant as Something Rotten’s attempt to insert grand stakes into its world of millennial banality may feel, it reveals a deeper truth about America’s current social climate. Having long grown accustomed to being the commanding influence in language, style, music, and politics, the novelty of American hegemony has worn off and we’ve been left to stagnate. For now, this cultural rot is most easily observable when held against the comparatively functional backdrop of Europe, but as the façade of America’s cultural legitimacy continues to crumble away, its true extent will be exposed.