[2] Their followup novel, Infinite Home (2015), deals with the housing shortage in New York City[3] and with Williams syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes an abnormally outgoing personality in those afflicted.
Alcott's third novel, America Was Hard to Find (2019), an epic loosely centered on space travel between Sputnik (1957) and the Challenger disaster (1986), was noted for its "sprawling" historical scope, its multifaceted cultural critique of the United States, and its frank treatment of feminism,[5] countercultural radicalism, and the AIDS crisis.
[6] The New Yorker stated that the book "displays a sure-handed lyricism—from the lunar surface, the sky appears 'glossy like a baby girl's church shoes'—but its energy lies in its skepticism about the American century and the parallels the author finds between contradictory currents.
[12] Anthony Doerr writes that their “prose […] is always trending away from straightforward clarity toward something more interesting.”[13] In a commentary on the care required to balance this clarity with more figurative language, the narrator of Alcott's story “Natural Light,” a professor of creative writing, wondershow close a simile should get to the character’s actual life and circumstances: in comparing her inner sadness to the color of her dress, weren’t we depriving the reader of some useful speculative distance?
[15] To describe the 1969 Apollo landing in America Was Hard to Find, Alcott conducted what would be one of astronaut Alan Bean's final interviews.