Demographic change

A gorgeous blonde crosses the threshold of a softly furnished Parisian hotel room, hand in hand with a man. It is, we are told, the same room in which she was conceived 30 years earlier. The scene opened ‘Do It For Denmark’, a 2014 ad campaign by a Danish travel company, attempting to turn Paris into a sales pitch for parenthood after the country’s birth rate had plummeted to a 27-year low. Tongue in cheek, the advert claimed that 10 per cent of children are conceived on holiday.   More than a decade on, the same story is unfolding worldwide. In Generation Maybe, Camilla Cavendish, the former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit under David Cameron, charts an ‘extraordinary wave’ of childlessness sweeping the world.

Would readers approaching this novel (although novel might not be precisely the right word) without any indication as to the authorship recognise it as the work of Jonathan Lethem? It doesn’t have kangaroo gangsters packing heat, or sentient miniature black holes, or marine drills converted into nuclear-powered limos. It is not set on an alien planet, or in a parallel universe, or inside a simulated game. There are a few hints. It is set in Brooklyn and has a vaguely geeky feel to it; but tonally it seems very different to Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude. Instead of vernal exuberance there is autumnal wistfulness, but certainly not sentimentality.