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.