The Reading Experience

Not Living at the White-Hot Center

On the one hand, I don't really understand why a novel like K.B. Dixon's Andrew (A to Z) (Inkwater Press) isn't published by a larger, "mainstream" press rather than the small, essentially regional press that has published it. (Inkwater is located in Portland, Oregon, and, as far as I can tell, attention to the book has been confined mostly to the Pacific Northwest, including a review in the Oregonian, the only review the book has garnered.) It offers a reasonably engaging protagonist, who, as the novel's first-person narrator, possesses a generally lively writing style that at times can even be rather penetrating, and it is structured in a mildly unorthodox way--through alphabetically arranged entries that make the story of Andrew a kind of lexicographical guide to his life--that piques the reader's interest but surely doesn't really pose a threat to narrative coherence for most readers. It's at least as good as most of the "literary fiction" published by even the biggest New York publishers, and I have to conclude that the decisions by which this sort of fiction is published by these publishers are entirely arbitrary, at best guided by some wild guess about what might prove suitably commercial.

On the other hand, that one could imagine such a book as Andrew (A to Z) being brought out by a large commercial press suggests its most significant limitation as a putative work of "experimental" fiction, which its structured fragmentation clearly enough broadcasts it to be (and under which heading the Oregonian review introduces it). While the dictionary-entry form the novel assumes does fracture the "story" into seemingly arbitrary bits, ultimately the entries themselves still seem to have been chosen to illustrate certain pre-chosen features of Andrew's life and circumstances that eventually do add up to a fairly conventional account of a lightly-alienated, white collar employee and his elementary-school teacher wife. Fragmentation as a narrative strategy has by now been pretty thoroughly assimililated into the fiction writer's available array of structural devices, and unfortunately Andrew (A to Z) doesn't make especially provocative use of it. It presents us with the details of Andrew's experiences and obsessions in a shuffled, nonlinear fashion, but finally doesn't really encourage us to reflect very much either on the fragmented way in which we do in fact experience much of our lives or on the further variations that might be wrung out of fragmentation as a literary motif or narrative method.

Part of the reason why the alphabetic organization of this novel doesn't finally add up to much more than a modestly entertaining exercise in controlled discontinuity is perhaps that the underlying narrative is so familiar. Not much literally happens in Andrew (A to Z), for reasons Andrew himself ponders near the end of the novel: "My aversion to conflict and and the respectfulness with which I indulge that aversion makes me inherently undramatizable. There is no rising action in the story of me; nothing is set in motion by an exciting force because exciting forces are invariably neutralized by my incessant, quasi-pathological cautiousness."

This brief metafictional moment would seem to be the author's ironic comment on the fact that he has created a character who doubts "there is a place for me in fiction." Through the gradual accretion of evidence that Andrew is indeed largely "undramatizable," Dixon has dramatized Andrew"s very lack of dramatic interest. He is a modern American suburban man who doesn't quite understand how he got to be such, but who accepts his status more or less passively. He's a pretty keen observer of the confusions and limitations of his life, but he can't really bring himself to do anything in particular to change it. To me, this has become an increasingly commonplace kind of character in American fiction, and an increasingly uninteresting one, and Andrew (A to Z) does little to elevate such a character to a more consequential status as a "representative" figure in American life. The best he can do is provide the character with a quietly sardonic voice and the occasional perceptive remark. Which aren't nothing. Any novel containing passages like this is still worth reading:

It's entirely possible that there are too few intravenous drug users in my life--at least that's the feeling I get from Stephen who has a life full of them. According to him, if you are not personally acquainted with someone who's in prison for murder, then you are not leading a vital, authentic life. If your girlfriend hasn't burned you with a cigarette or stabbed you in the buttocks with a penknife, then you are not living at the white-hot center of it as you should be. But then, of course, Stephen is a romantic.

The Seagulls Inside My Head

Alain Robbe-Grillet begins his essay "From Realism to Reality" (in For a New Novel) with what must be a truism:

All writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical. . .Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to counter certain writers with certain others; it is, on the contrary, a flag under which the enormous majority--if not all--of today's novelists enlist. And no doubt we must believe them all, on this point. It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best as can to create "the real." (Translation by Richard Howard)

Robbe-Grillet believed himself to be a realist and his attempts at advancing a "new novel" an effort to preserve the possibility of realism in fiction against the insistence of some critics that the novel remain encased in its pre-modern form. "The discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms," Robbe Grillet writes. "Unless we suppose that the world is henceforth entirely discovered (and, in that case, the wisest thing would be to stop writing altogether), we can only attempt to go farther. It is not a question of 'doing better,' but of advancing in ways as yet unknown, in which a new kind of writing becomes necessary."

This "new kind of writing" is necessary for realism's sake. Even if it is true that each succeeding generation of writers "has different ideas of reality," that "the classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal," the task of coping with "the objective modifications of reality" that have continued to develop at an ever increasing pace since the 19th century requires that the novel remain open to the kind of formal innovation that might--for the moment, at least--begin to "account for what is real today."

But Robbe-Grillet didn't think that the "realism" of novels consisted of merely reflecting the "real world" it encountered but that it actually worked to create reality:

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation. All those--politicians and others--who ask of a book only stereotypes, and who fear above all the spirit of contestation, can only mistrust literature.

Robbe-Grillet comes a little closer to commenting on the kind of realism one finds in his own books when he reflects on a trip he once took to the Brittany coast:

On the way I told myself: here is a good opportunity to observe things 'from life' and to 'refresh my memory.' But from the first gull I saw, I understood my error: on the one hand, the gulls I now saw had only very confused relations with those I was describing in my book, and on the other hand it couldn't have mattered less to me whether they did or not. The only gulls that mattered to me at that moment were those which were inside my head. Probably they came there, one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps from Brittany; but they had been transformed, becoming at the same time somehow more real because they were now imaginary.

Those gulls inside the head are the gulls that make it into Robbe-Grillet's novels, even if they are described with a kind of obsessive exactitude that makes us believe they're a copy from "real life." Or, for example, we get this, the opening paragraph of Jealousy, which describes the south side of the house that will be the immediate setting for all of the novel:

Now the shadow of the column--the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof--divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This verana is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides. Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun, which is still too high in the sky. The wooden walls of the house--that is, its front and west gable-end--are still protected from the sun by the roof (common to the house proper and the terrace). So at this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.

Already we can see Robbe-Grillet beginning to "constitute" the reality of the novel's setting, which will extend to the banana plantation of which this house is the center, all described in the same painstaking, concentrated manner. And it is a particularly literal-minded kind of description: no fussy, unnecessary adjectives, no figurative flourishes to get in the way of a full-on apprehension of the house and its wooden walls, its veranda flagstones and "vertical surfaces." Robbe-Grillet's approach has at times been called "cinematic," but what could be less cinematic than this description of the banana trees:

In the second row, starting from the far left, there would be twenty-two trees (because of the alternate arrangement) in the case of a rectangular patch. There would also be twenty-two for a patch that was precisely trapezoidal, the reduction being scarely noticeable at such a short distance from its base. And, in fact, there are twenty-two trees there.

But the third row too has only twenty-two trees, instead of twenty three which the alternately-arranged rectangle would have. No additional difference is introduced, at this level, by the bulge in the lower edge. The same is true for the fourth row, which includes twenty-one boles, that is, one less than an even row of the imaginary rectangle.

It is generally assumed that film provides a more immediate and more distinct rendering of perceptible objects (at least visually), but passages like this demonstate that verbal depictions of such objects are, potentially at least, capable of a far greater range of effects, of bringing us much closer to the palpable qualities of things. In his essay, Robbe-Grillet writes of Kafka that "if there is one thing of which an unprejudiced realing convinces us it is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. . .Perhaps Kafka's staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them, step by step, following the detail of the banisters and the risers. Perhaps his gray walls hide something, but it is on them that the memory lingers, on their cracked whitewash, their crevices." The same is true of Robbe-Grillets descriptions; they force our attention on what is there. We remember (or should) the arrangements and textures of the plantation house, the symmetries of the banana rows.

Some might say that Robbe-Grillet's descriptions don't qualify as "realism" at all, since they appear to reject the principle of selectivity of detail and renounce the effort to enhance the real through figurative language, both of which are believed by such guardians of literary realism to be among its most crucial enabling conventions. But this is to confuse the practice of a certain kind of commercialized storytelling with realism, the latter of which probably becomes more genuine the farther away it gets from storytelling. It is to pin the concept of realism down to a few customary gestures that assume a stability of reference to "the real" and denies that this is a state of affairs to be discovered rather than presupposed. In abandoning these gestures, Robbe-Grillet's "experimental" fiction is actually an experiment in the further possibilities of realism, a realism that accepts, as Robbe-Grillet puts it in his essay's conclusion, that "everything is constantly changing" and that "there is always something new."

The realism of Jealousy is about as far away from modern "psychological realism," and especially the mode of narration James Wood defends as the "free indirect" method, as it could be. Our access to the characters and their environment remains entirely on the surface, our knowledge of what they are "thinking" confined entirely to what we can infer through their actions. This, is, of course, faithful to the way we do in fact experience reality, and the spurious notion that fiction is some magical way for writers to open up consciousness to our direct examination beyond what people say and do is duly dispensed with in Robbe-Grillet's novel. This is not to say that we don't ultimately gain access to a character's mental state, but this character is neither A. . . (not further named), the plantation wife, nor her possible lover, Franck (we're never entirely sure they are lovers), the ostensible protagonists of Jealousy. One could say that the true protagonist of the novel is the emotion named in the title, which we finally come to understand is expressed by the narrator, who is not the detached omniscient narrator we first assume him to be (or at least is also more than that) but the husband of A. . . and an observer of her suspicious behavior.

Thus we do almost literally inhabit the consciousness of this character, and we are determined in our experience of Jealousy's fictional world by the skillful manipulation of point of view--in this case a third-person/first-person hybrid. But, since we can't rest comfortably in the author's probing of the character's mind in a "free indirect" way, the effect is if anything to provoke us into re-reading the novel in order to direct our attention more carefully on the details and the actions through which, and only through which, can our awareness of the narrator's jealousy be raised. Jealousy encourages the reader to be an active participant in assembling whatever "meaning" we're to get from it; it doesn't allow us to settle passively for the "insight" afforded us by Wood's preferred strategy of "inflected" narration.

What this hybrid point of view allows Robbe-Grillet to do most thoroughly, however, is to create an intimately "realistic" world that both mirrors the narrator's own fixated absorption in detail--his "perpetual interrogation"-- and uses that absorption to "invent" scenes and circumstances of dense realistic detail. So dedicated is Robbe-Grillet to the invention of these scenes that he repeats many of them, enlisting his narrator in a repetition and return to specific details and events--the remains of a centipede killed while walking across a wall, workers fixing a bridge, etc.--as if making sure they have been surveyed for all of the attributes they can be made to reveal. The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer's determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.

They Hadn't Heard Us Calling

"Point of view" is an element of fiction that, it seems to me, is often invoked but seldom really appreciated. In our haste to get to the "story," or to ascertain what the work in question has "to say," we acknowledge that the narrative is presented in "third-person" or "first-person," but don't appropriately consider how both of these modes of presentation--as well as their many subtle if less recognized variations--affect the terms of our encounter with both the story told and what is said. This goes well beyond the usual distinctions made between "reliable" and "unreliable" narrators (although this distinction remains important), "omniscience" and "central consciousness," or stories told by the main character and those told by a secondary observer. My reading experiences convince me that point of view is not simply a flourish added to the underlying "content" of fiction, nor a way of establishing "voice," not just a way of providing stability while the story unfolds, but fundamentally conditions our perception of all of the other "elements" of fiction we otherwise might think take precedence: plot, character, setting, etc.

The centrality of point of view in determining the nature of the fictional "world" we are entering in a particular work of fiction became only more obvious to me while reading Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, a novel I had not previously read because I had assumed, mistakenly I must now say, it was written primarily to become a movie, as is the case with so much current "literary fiction." I both admired and enjoyed the novel, and mostly for the same reason. I admired the way in which Eugenides was able to maintain his experiment in first-person plural narration--"we" rather than "I" as the origin of the narrator's voice--and I enjoyed the collective invocation of the Lisbon sisters and the story of their early deaths that the narrative embodies. Much of what I enjoyed in the novel--the detached view of the sisters, the baffled way in which the stand-in narrator attempts to comprehend both the sisters' behavior and the love-trance induced in him and his confederates by their charms, the ultimate mystery of the sisters' decision to do themselves in--have been singled out by some reviewers and commentators as flaws, however, and it does seem to me that this results from an unwillingness to allow the novel's adopted point of view to create the sort of effects it is most naturally inclined to produce.

It is true that we don't ever really get very close to the Lisbon sisters, so that as characters, indeed, as the ostensible protagonists of the story, they don't quite come into focus as much as we might like. They remain wispy, uncertain figures in a novel that inevitably leads us to seek more definition, more certainty. We are just as bewildered by the Lisbon sisters, and just as unclear about what might be going on in that house across the street--the perspective we are forced to assume--as the narrator, but this is not a problem with "characterization." Since there is no satisfactory answer to the question "Why?"--not even the narrator's assiduous efforts to compile "evidence" and interview the Lisbon parents can provide such an answer--or since Eugenides wants to suggest that getting to "know" the Lisbon sisters by taking us inside their heads will leave us no more enlightened, their role as characters in this novel is necessarily limited to the external observations given. To complain about this is to deny the novel its enabling source of expression in the inquiring "we".

It is tempting to say that the narrator(s) become the main characters, but this isn't quite right either. Only occasionally does one of the boys emerge from behind the verbal curtain to assume an active role vis-a-vis one of the sisters--most notably "Trip Fontane," who attempts to court Lux Lisbon--and the narrator's role ultimately is really to testify to the enduring spell cast by the sisters, to give us access to them through a concerted act of memory from which they have never departed:

Our own knowledge of Cecilia kept growing after her death, too, with the same unnatural persistence. Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to get her purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under out tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.

The Virgin Suicides could thus be called a novel without conventional characters (the closest to a rounded, "sympathetic" character might be Mr. Lisbon, who almost becomes compelling in his cluelessness) and, since the sisters' fate is more or less known from the beginning, not much plot aside from the filling-in of details. If plot and character are what you must have, these no doubt must seem to be irremediable deficiencies, but the narrative method Eugenides employs invites us to cultivate a different relationship with the characters, one that emphasizes wonder over intimacy, and assume a more relaxed attitude toward plot, one that allows for meditation on what happened, not just a serial record of what did happen. The point of view in The Virgin Suicides works to shape a particular kind of fictional space, one that accentuates distance and concealment. Narrating it from some other perspective would have produced a wholly different, in my opinion much more ordinary novel.

Many readers and critics approach The Virgin Suicides for its thematic implications, its depiction of stifling suburbia, a morally unhinged middle class, the decline of the industrial Midwest, etc., but I think even these concerns gain the prominence they do because of the way the narrative is related to us. The near-mythic quality the story takes on, its rendition of decline-and-fall, the implication of the whole community in the unfolding of its collective trauma provide the tale of the Lisbon suicides a heightened drama that substitutes for the lesser drama of mere plot and gives the tale a kind of allegorical resonance. A less well-calibrated narrative strategy would not have accomplished the same effect.

Literary Restructuring

I'm willing to go along with Lorin Stein's proposal that American book critics be given their share of government bail-out money, provided a few conditions are established and observed:

No money shall be given to print-based publications "that already review" unless the current slate of editors and most prominent reviewers agree to resign. These are, after all, the very people who have plunged print criticism into its current crisis through their decisions to write and publish vacuous reviews of no long-term merit, and should the publications they represent continue to print book reviews, these people should not profit from their past violations of the public trust.

If money is provided for "funding start-ups in the spirit of the New York Review," those entrusted with editorial decisions in these new entities cannot be the same old hacks who elsewhere have plunged print criticism, etc. They should not be allowed to convert these publications into forums for political and social commentary easily enough handled in other kinds of publications not called "book reviews" and to exclude fiction and poetry so thoroughly from consideration that eventually only the occasional nod to well-known writers or biographies of same are ever printed in these organs. They should hire reviewers who actually like fiction and poetry, and these should be "start-up" reviewers as well, not tied to the superannuated publishing and critical establishments whose depradations the bail-out money is meant to counteract.

All parties receiving bail-out money will pledge to resist the idea that criticism is part of the "commerce of culture." If the the purpose of literary criticism is, as Ms. Stein suggests, to separate "quality from hype" and to serve a "free press devoted to books," the notion that either literature or literary criticism has something to do with what's called "commerce" must be disregarded at all costs.

Finally, if literary criticism is conceived by either editors or reviewers as part of an effort to allow readers "to find out what's actually good, short of reading the books themselves," the entire bail-out program must be immediately terminated. No money should be expended on "criticism" as consumer guidance, criticism that actually discourages readers from "reading the books themselves" and making their own judgments. Only book reviews that accurately and fairly represent the books under review without rendering judgments appropriate to the courtroom but not to the "free" experience of literature will be allowed under this program.

Last Book Business Post--Coda

Responding to my previous post, Ted Striphas clarifies his argument about the need to help people "fit reading better into their everyday lives" through breaking books into shorter pieces:

Option one is to imagine that people have been seduced by electronic media — lulled by television, the internet, Twitter, video games, and more into a state in which they are pathologically unable to focus and, by extension, incapable of following a book-length narrative from beginning to end.

Option two is to recognize the numerous “environmental” factors that make it extremely difficult for people to find sustained time for book reading in their everyday lives. Hence the examples from my earlier post, of leaf blowers, crying babies, etc.

Since the first option "places all of the responsibility for not reading squarely on people’s shoulders and opens them (us?) up to moral condemnation," Striphas goes for option two, which assumes that "people do indeed want to read but that specific aspects of their everyday lives simply get in the way."

I don't know that it requires we believe a mass audience has been "seduced" by media into a state of pathological inattention to text in order to explain why books seem less appealing to this audience . The visual and electronic alternatives Striphas names offer a choice to their "consumers," who duly consume them instead of books because, I have to conclude, they prefer them over books as a way of passing the time. Acknowledging this does not open up such people to "moral condemnation" but simply recognizes that a) for a majority of people, reading, especially of fiction, is merely a way of passing time and that b) for most of these people, tv, movies, and text-messaging are preferred over "book-length narratives" among the time-passing alternatives. It is the way of the world, and no amount of chapter shearing is going to bring this mass audience to books except, indeed, for the occasional puerile potboiler such as The Da Vinci Code.

The assumption behind arguments such as the one Striphas makes is that reading is per se preferable to these other choices, no matter what kind of book might be read, and I can't agree that it is. In fact, if I were to advise someone whether it would be more rewarding to watch, say, Monk, or to read The Da Vinci Code, or its current equivalent on the Best Seller list, I would unhesitantingly say the former. Books that provide a complex experience well beyond what can be offered up on tv surely are more worth the time expended on them, but such books can't be chopped up into more easily digestible portions without undermining their very purpose. Readers have to take them as they are or leave them alone. Manufacturing other "books" so that they more closely resemble every other entertainment device accomplishes nothing for real reading, and won't work, anyway. Who needs books as a simulacrum of a tv show when you've got the real thing available?

Of course, the whole effort to bring books into the "contexts within which people live" might not be about encouraging reading at all, or at least not primarily. It might be about the effort to save book publishing as "a bona fide capitalist enterprise."

My Very Last Post on the Book Business Ever

This guy thinks that publishers ought to encourage writers to write in "smaller chapters" because his sister found the chapters in The Da Vinci Code "cinematic." "Perhaps that’s true," he continues,

but having watched her read the book over the next couple of days, I couldn’t help but think that they were even more televisual in nature. She could sit down and read for five or ten minutes at a clip, non-commitally, and even manage to finish a chapter or two in the process. She could read distractedly, as the text didn’t demand that she sustain her attention for very long. What’s remarkable is that the book, despite being more than 400 pages, hardly behaves like a substantial (as in long) work of fiction.

Scott Esposito has already pointed out the contradictions between the author's assurances he doesn't contend "that people’s attention spans are waning" and his worry that these days we're too often distracted by "a loud truck rolling by" or "the incessant drone of leaf blowers," but unfortunately the author probably does believe the greatest threat to reading is the racket generated by lawn equipment and "publishing professionals" will probably take his defense of televisual prose quite seriously.

Indeed, since taking the advice to "attune their sensitivities better to the fine-grain of everyday life" and make books safe for reading "five or ten minutes at a clip, non-commitally" is the most idiotic and self-destructive thing publishers could do, they no doubt will do it, with great dispatch. Even though such an approach thoroughly undermines all the arguments made on behalf of the "book" as an intellectually superior mode of communication and places it exactly on par with every other form of "information technology" at our disposal, and even though it subverts the very purpose of reading by assuring "readers" books will no longer "demand that [we] sustain [our] attention for very long," the "brevity-is-better" method might still extend the death agonies of the book business long enough to squeeze out another mega-seller or two. It might keep books and reading in thrall to the imperatives of corporate capitalism a little longer, and this, of course, is everything.

Sometimes the short chapter or segment can be used to great aesthetic effect. Aharon Appelfeld, for example (I've just finished reading his All Whom I Have Loved), often breaks his generally short narratives into quite short chapters, but these chapters are not simply links in a glittery chain of events. They sink in and spread out rather than serve as simply the latest plot point in the rush to get from there to there. This is clearly not what Ted Striphas has in mind. He wants books in bite-size bits that readers can consume "non-commitally." Applefeld writes books that engage our attention, profoundly. Striphas would be content with books as superficial as any other entertainment option that helps us waste our time rather than redeem it.

Publishers have pursued the "dumbing-down strategy" to the point where they have now essentially ruined book publishing as an endeavor devoted more to the cultivation of good writers--writers whose audience might extend beyond the present and into succeeding generations--than the cultivation of cash. Even those involved in its ruination know that they're doing it, but acknowledge they can't stop themselves, as this recent article by an editor who "until recently worked for a large publisher in New York" attests:

A system that requires the trucking of vast quantities of paper to bookshops and then back to publishers’ warehouses for pulping is environmentally and commercially unsustainable. An industry that spends all its money on bookseller discounts and very little on finding an audience is getting things the wrong way round. Following the strictures of their accountants, the large houses will intensify their concentration on blockbusters. High street bookshops will abandon deep stockholding, becoming mere showrooms for bestsellers and prize-winners.

If shorter chapters can get a few more people into those bookshops and continue to prop up this moribund system, why not try it?

If we're lucky, the props will come crashing down sooner rather than later, and we'll be rid both of the buttoned-down stooges who have made it so unnecessarily difficult for serious readers to find the books they still want, as well as for serious writers to find any readers at all, and of enablers like Ted Striphas. If we're even luckier, the small and independent presses (see the list to the right) that to some extent are forced to mimic the actions of the corporate publishers in order to survive will feel less pressure to do so and their implicit mission of bringing worthwhile books to those of us who actually like to read--both short chapters and long ones--can be more profitably fulfilled. No doubt the cybersphere will also contribute to a book culture focused more on bringing particular books together with individual readers than on ginning up a mob response.

If corporate book publishing were to disappear entirely, leaving books--especially fiction--to their appropriate "niche" among those who read "commitally," I, for one, would be a happy man. In the meantime, I will confine my attentions to the good books that do still, miraculously, continue to appear.