Missing The Point
From the New York Times “100 Notable Books of the Year”, this blurb under a book by Alice Munro:
Her 11th collection of short stories about people who do what our neighbors do but far more vividly.
No, your neighbours are that vivid, and you don’t notice. That is what literature teaches: how to look. It’s striking, I think, that such a clueless blurb can appear in a paper like the Times.
January 12th, 2005 at 11:05 am
This is actually a comment about something you wrote over a year ago. I saw Franzen speak last night and had a question about the narnia references—ie religion as drug in “the corrections”. He didn’t get to my question. I was wondering what you had to say about it…do you think that he avoided that question when you went to hear him because of where it would position him on religion?