“One of the jobs novels used to do was to create a universe for characters, one that felt believable and complicated. But the complexity of life at the moment is such that no writer is able to keep up. The novel once had a dream of itself as this universal art form that could describe to the world to everybody in a way that everybody could understand, and that no longer rings true.”Up until the minute I read this, I still had that dream, that the novel could describe the world to everybody in a way that everybody could understand. Now I may be convinced otherwise. It was a startling thought!
I think the better a book is, the better it succeeds at that dream.
But I find it freeing to think that novels no longer have the burden of being universal.
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