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[...] In his review of Adaptation, David Ulin argues for seeing Kaufman not as merely a screenplay writer but as a "great American writer ... [with] his mastery of structure, his voice and vision, his recognition of the power of the word to remake the world -- he stands with the finest writers of…

[...] Wallace argues that "part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering" so that we might "more easily conceive of others identifying with our own [suffering]." Second, he claims "a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness an…

[...] Through encounters with character after character whose perspective has narrowed to an impossibly painful point, and through the search for a context that might redeem all that suffering, the act of reading the book becomes similar to one of the AA meetings it depicts -- through Identificatio…

[...] discomfort goes hand in hand with the therapy -- that the emotional response, in fact, is a sign the medicine is working. As Wallace's comments imply, a novel is therapeutic only to the extent it allows readers to see aspects of the world (particularly, of themselves) that they have resisted …

The difficulty of this task for the writer, explored in the interview with Larry McCaffery and in "E Unibus Pluram," is that it cannot succeed if the reader is passive, merely swept along by the story to a satisfying conclusion. Viewer passivity was the weapon of choice of corporate media, as Walla…