![]() ![]() ![]() This makes for not just bad art but also a shirking form of cowardice it implies that the values held by right-thinking people today should have been obvious to any decent person of any previous era because they are eternal, essential truths and therefore subject to no revision. It's a stupid premise that reinforces the complacency of contemporary readers and absolves the author from coming to terms with the past. Take the example of Sena Jeter Naslund's "Ahab's Wife," an inexplicably admired book in which the heroine, married to Melville's captain and the product of a poor, rural, puritanical 19th century Kentucky home, inexplicably possesses the enlightened secular liberal attitudes of a 20th century Marin County housewife. ![]() They have been overrun with the flabbiest sort of wishful thinking. While more and more writers and readers have been drawn to the form, the books themselves get worse and worse. ![]()
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