In praise of dark books
Thank you, Steven Beattie:
Heller has hit on the precise word to describe this demand for uplift and sympathetic characters in fiction: infantile. It's almost pathologically regressive to demand that writers, who are supposed to engage with the world as it is, not as it ought to be, should spend their time rubbing their readers' backs and cooing about how everything's going to be okay before sending them off to bed with a cup of hot cocoa. Fortunately, there are writers--Heller, Richards, Barbara Gowdy, Philip Roth, Michel Houellebecq--who understand this. But it's unlikely any of them will be making an appearance on Oprah's book club any time soon.
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