A big HUH?
(Breaking news: today the streets were being cleaned, hooray hooray. Is once a week sufficient at this time of year? Answer comes: no.)
***
From a review at salon.com, via a post at Ambling Along the Aqueduct:
It's precisely when we are conscious of fictional characters as the invention of a literary author that they seem inert and fixed -- solipsistic -- to many readers, who usually don't feel entitled to quibble with the exalted creator about his choices. By contrast, the characters and events in memoirs are often, like real people and events, the subjects of energetic controversy, which makes them seem more alive.... The real world, after all, is available for an infinite range of interpretations, while we tend to see the products of the literary novelist's imagination as admitting only a few, and most of those are likely to be detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate.
Both of these notions are illusions, of course. It's not the made-up aspect of literary fiction that makes it seem marmoreal and remote -- otherwise, millions of people wouldn't be discussing the entirely fictional characters on "Lost" or "Mad Men" around the water cooler or in online forums. Children and adults would not have massed in bookstores at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter installment. Those fictions -- TV shows and children's books -- have, like the memoir, not yet acquired the official status of Art. As long as they remain at least a little disreputable, they are our size, and lovable. But make the memoir respectable, clear it of all the charges against it -- of vulgarity and commercialism and calling too much attention to itself, as well as of fraud -- and chances are that sooner or later we'll get bored of it, too.
Wow, am I the space alien, or is she? Has she never, ever, had a heated discussion about the characters in canonical literature? 'Inert and fixed' is not the word one would apply. Maybe, yes, in self-consciously srs litfic authors of the turn of the C20th-21st, but, to take one example, Middlemarch (well, I would, wouldn't I?) - I don't think Ms Evans was going for 'detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate', rly trooly. Is that even, necessarily, a dichotomy?
Duh? Huh?
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