For her satire and close attention to matters of marriage and manners, Lurie has often been compared to Jane Austen.

But as far as Only Children is concerned, the most remarkable literary precedent would be. Henry James, especially his What Maisie Knew (1897), which shares similar subject matter and technique.

Maisie is a girl whose parents divorce and fight over her, less for love than for image. The novel is narrated from her eyes, although not in her voice, as James explains in his preface, "I should have to stretch the matter to what my wondering witness [Maisie] materially and inevitably saw, a great deal of which quantity she either wouldn't understand or would quite misunderstand." As his tide suggests, James is interested in what children know, yet he recognized the difficulty of truthfully representing the child's thoughts, so he had to find a way to concretely...