The flap about [The Chapman Report's] overt sexuality was less than justified, especially when that novel is compared with The Sins of Philip Fleming. The earlier novel was much more sexually explicit, but no one bothered to attack it. The sexual controversy overlapped into the charges that Wallace had manufactured a bestseller by stringing together frantic sex with a scant story line. But if sex sold Chapman, then sex should have sold Fleming.

Wallace wrote Chapman because he wanted to write about married women and their problems—the sexual problems being minor compared to the insensitivity and stupidity of men. Thematically, Chapman is less about sexual matters than about the tensions of suburbia and how they are manifested in a variety of unhappy ways. If Chapman was bought and read for its sex, then many readers were disappointed. As Wallace told the Italian press after the novel...