Without sympathy, whether for the writer or for the fictional characters, a work of fiction has a very hard time mattering. It may well be a defect of my own character that my literary tastes are so deeply intertwined with my responses, as a person, to the person of the author-that I persist in disliking the posturing young Steinbeck who wrote “Tortilla Flat” while loving the later Steinbeck who fought back personal and career entropy and produced “East of Eden,” and that I draw what amounts to a moral distinction between the two-but I suspect that sympathy, or its absence, is involved in almost every reader’s literary judgments. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that a fiction writer’s oeuvre is a mirror of the writer’s character. Photograph from Estate of Edith Wharton / Beinecke Library, Yale University Wharton’s many privileges make her hard to like.
0 kommentar(er)
