People had also begun to read differently, it seemed: a phenomenon that had something to do with the internet and something to do with the markets more generally, which were based increasingly on the trafficking of abstractions. The relationship between writer and reader had grown especially transactional, didactic; a peculiar kind of literalism had taken hold. It was in the face of this literalism, you thought, that the great writers had pried open and enlarged the space that separated story from truth, widening it bit by bit into a vast commons in which everyone might live.
