Like many adult men, N hasn’t read any fiction for years. He reads a lot but not fiction.
Finally, my raptures over Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead convinced him to pick up this novel. Now he’s glued to it and says it restored his love of fiction.
It’s real art, people. American literature at its best. I’m feeling envious of my husband because he’s just now reading this novel for the first time.
The review that I read for Demon Copperhead seems to indicate that it is a novel with the same theme that Beth Macy wrote about in her Dopesick. Or maybe Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance which I have not read.
Have stories about the ‘deplorables’ become the new hot genre as well as anti-establishment country songs? Is it a sign that the worm turns?
Well, it’s still only one novel amidst a barrage of novels about fussy rich people fretting over their privilege. But it’s still a good sign that it appeared.
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Why do men so often do this? I tend this way too, even though there’s a wealth of fiction I enjoy and which I read consistently in high school. I have gone from “no fiction” to “some fiction,” at least
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Hans Fallada is an excellent writer of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. He wrote about the German “deplorables” of the 1920s and 1930s. Real good stuff.
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My dad is right up there with you. Reads memoirs, history, and economics texts these days. Nothing else. But I remember there being fiction on the shelf that was “dad’s books” when I was a kid. He hasn’t always been this way.
I think he has a feeling he’s read all the fiction plots already and why repeat them? Meanwhile, only so much time left to read the really interesting stuff… clock’s ticking.
A conservative literary critic and college professor
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