Word: fiction
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...level, this butterfly-fiction trend is just a variation on the classic dorm-room-stoner epiphany: that everything is, like, connected, dude. But it also rings true with our lives, which are linked to those of strangers around the world today in ways we sense but can't quite comprehend. We are at "war" against loose networks of enemies with no uniform or flag. Our jobs are at the mercy of vast global webs. We make sprawling (if shallow) ties through social-networking websites. We worry if our emissions will come back to us as global warming, if our foreign...
Butterfly fiction is not necessarily political. But when it is, it has an affinity with liberalism, perhaps because of its focus on how individuals can be shaped--or ruined--by social systems. Crash was a 10-car pileup of pieties about race relations. Emilio Estevez's hyperearnest film Bobby (opening later this month) juxtaposes the 1968 assassination of progressive martyr Robert F. Kennedy--portrayed messianically as the last, best hope for the race- and war-torn U.S.--with the imbricated stories of 22 characters. (One of whom is played by ... Ashton Kutcher. Coincidence? I think...
Whatever sententious hoo-ha Babel is freighted with, however, there is a larger point in it and its butterfly-fiction cohort that cuts across political boundaries: that in the globalization, global-warming, global-terror era, other people's problems are our own, and class privilege and a U.S. passport are no force field. (Indeed, Babel's story of Americans in mortal peril among foreigners even echoes, if inadvertently, a Bush Administration refrain: that we are no longer protected by two big oceans.) You can argue the politics and the art of Babel and company. It is harder to argue their...
...clichés go in mysteries and thrillers, you can’t get much more generic than a red handprint on a black background as your cover. Unfortunately for John Grisham, the premise of his debut non-fiction work, which is “an exploration of small-town justice gone terribly awry,” looks about as interesting as his cover. Go back to fiction, John...
...make your characters consistent. Life doesn't. A janitor abruptly decides he will become a writer, while his glamorous wife, selling fox capes in a big hotel, suddenly, while still young, develops Parkinson's. Munro's fiction seems uncannily true to the world because destiny plays havoc with characters' circumstances even when they don't do the same themselves...