It’s hardly original to point out that forms of copying are foundational to creativity. Even pointing out that this is not original is not original. And making the same point using exclusively the language of others, edited slightly for consistency, also wouldn’t be original. Still, it bears repeating. The recirculation of this notion should surprise no one—it should be accepted as the truly unoriginal, inescapable idea that it is—but because it isn’t a naturalized idea, it often feels counterintuitive, contrary, knowing, tricksy. Why is it so awkward to integrate this notion, of repetition and derivation as the basis for new literary works, into our actual habits of thinking, reading and writing?
Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?
But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”
As fan cultures have deepened, these cookbooks have evolved, too. Less prevalent are the ones that simply name recipes after characters. Today’s pop-culture cookbooks are heavily researched tomes about their fictional worlds. They consider climates and character motivations. They fill in gaps in the narrative. Authors pore over every element — down to the props in recipe photos — so fans can feel fully immersed.
Initially, it’s hard to take the novel’s spiritual concerns seriously. Given his reputation for piercing characters on the mandibles of his superior intellect, a praying Franzen doesn’t feel much more sanctified than a praying mantis. But “Crossroads” quickly demonstrates that it isn’t — or isn’t just — a satire of suburban church culture or the hypocrisies of religious faith. It’s an electrifying examination of the irreducible complexities of an ethical life. With his ever-parsing style and his relentless calculation of the fractals of consciousness, Franzen makes a good claim to being the 21st century’s Nathaniel Hawthorne.
It is hard to describe what this book is about, but its refusal to fit into familiar categories is a large part of its pleasure. Peterson writes this story with the flat affect of a fairy tale: her characters are archetypes, her language tends toward the abstract, and she creates a world that is at once bizarre and recognizable.
“The Lincoln Highway” is a long and winding road, but one Towles’s motley crew navigates with brains, heart and courage. The novel embraces the contradictions of our character with a skillful hand, guiding the reader forward with “a sensation of floating – like one who’s being carried down a wide river on a warm summer day.”