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The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living? Nicholson Baker, “The Art of Fiction No. 212,” The Paris Review
A power has been taken away, it can never be given back again. It felt, you said, like a kind of castration. But that’s what age is, isn’t it? Slo-mo castration. (Am I quoting you here? Did I get this from one of your books?)
Think of Kurt Vonnegut’s complaint that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
Useless to quote Kafka on The Metamorphosis: “Imperfect almost to its very marrow.”
Even those aspiring writers your students seemed never to judge a book on how well it fulfilled the author’s intentions but solely on whether it was the kind of book that they liked.
In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve of it. So it could happen: by writing about someone lost—or even just talking too much about them—you might be burying them for good.
