My ironic distance as a novelist has a lot to do with having been an anthropology student. Anthropology made me a cultural relativist, which is what everybody ought to be. People in the world over ought to be taught, seriously, that culture is a gadget, and that one culture is as arbitrary as another. That’s an important lesson, yet some people never hear of it. Then, when they’re adult, they can’t bear to hear of it. Culture is a gadget; it’s something we inherit. And you can fix it the way you fix a broken oil burner. You can fix it continuously.
