fwriction

A wonderful conversation between Jeffrey Eugenides and Colm Toibin in today’s Opinion section of The New York Times. Love.

“Reality.” “Truth.” “Human consciousness.” Lovely words. At the end of his career, Henry James wrote a story, “The Jolly Corner,” in which he offered an interesting metaphor for what fiction writers do with these terms. In the story, there is a room in New York — a city James left when he was 12 — which his protagonist (who has also left) keeps in his possession all the years. It is dusted and waiting. It is haunted, it is his[…]

Thus the idea of making experience seem urgent, vital and alive remains at the core of our enterprise. We can bathe this in irony; we can find metaphors for it; we can even invent it and disguise it. But it is there in the room when there is nothing else in the room.