Toward the end of an article in the Village Voice, we read that, despite the success of the subject's third novel, both commercially (on the modest scale one can hope for, when hoping about literary novels) and critically,
The only thing missing, as so often is the case in fin de Bush America, is any intellectual engagement: No wider argument about his indictments of American culture or his writing; no discussion on whether or not Munchausen's-by-proxy is a real, widespread mental disorder.
The implicit opposition is, I suppose, the middle of the Clinton years, when literary novels routinely received scads of intellectual engagement in (not the virtual pages of blogs, which didn't really exist yet, but rather the actual pages of) newspapers' book review and even letters sections (not to mention Usenet). Rife with intellectual engagement, those days were! One also notes the reappearance of the idea, which already surfaced on the second page (I mean the second internet page) of the article, that of course the business of the literary novelist is to indict American culture; one hardly need be either a New Criterionist or a Know-Nothingist to find that trope rather tiresome, especially given that even the terms of the indictment are prescribed:
Strauss, like all outstanding novelists, elevates his personal obsessions to a wider indictment of our culture and its wobbly, often conveniently fraudulent relationships with truth and identity.
Couldn't one indict our wobbly, often conveniently fraudulent relationships with merit and value, or for that matter our vexed relationship with matters intellectual and artistic? Let's not close down avenues of indictment prematurely! There are surely as many valid indictments to be made as there are methods of inditement. (What, for instance, about diction?)
The really odd thing about this is, however, the idea that intellectual engagement with a novel might take the form of discussion of whether or not a particular mental disorder is real. Surely disposition over such questions is not within a novelist's remit? (Burgess claims of No Highway that it changed "aerodynamical doctrine", but I am skeptical.—that list, 99 Novels, is worthwhile, though; without it I would probably never have read either Lanark or At Swim-Two-Birds, or at least not when I did.) I don't doubt that Strauss can give a plausible portrayal of someone with Muchausen's-by-proxy, but that of course doesn't mean that any actual person has it. But I would rather imagine that any intellectual engagement with M-b-p that it would spark would be at the personal level, people talking to doctors or the like. Why, just because a novelist finds the topic interesting or thematically rich (and surely M-b-p is that), should proper engagement with it take the form of a widespread public discussion of its verisimilitude? That idea surely went the way of the raccoon coat, before the raccoon coat even made its appearance.
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