From today’s Book Section in the Boston Globe.
Art that baffles and Exhilarates
By James Sallis
The beauty of the novel, the great fascination of it, I often proclaim, shoehorning my words into a space taken up by sputtering attention spans, the latest celebrity news, and remakes of films that apparently (though who could have thought it?) were not bad enough upon initial release, is that it can do — can be — anything.
And is that, I wonder, looking out into the classroom, a vague terror I see in the eyes of my postulant writers? Nietzsche (I might continue) observed that every philosophy, every great summation of thought, however grand its intent, finally comes down to ”a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.” The same may be said of fiction, another, more modest summation of human experience.