“Barbara, the victimized babysitter, represents the American left, the ‘dreaming left’ who is abused and killed. Adults, who have no part in the action of the plot and never know what happened, are the political right. ‘And what’s left,’ the author explained, ‘is the “great silent American majority” that supposedly runs things in its odd and unpredictable fashion,’ the American middle that Mr. Johnson thinks of as the ‘American muddle.’ Mr. Johnson chose children to represent middle America ‘out of purest spite.’ No one wins in the book: the left gets killed, the right gets duped and the
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