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Denise S. Robbins's avatar

Holy shit now I want to read your (future) books and everything else you’ve written? I adore your theory of what literature should be and ascribe to something similar. I think we need to bring Romanticism back. Let’s bring Romanticism back!!! And I think there’s a way to do so without feeling like trodding old ground. It’s a response to today’s cynicism and navel-gazing focus on identity above all else. Rather: characters over identity: characters building themselves and reaching for something greater. My personal goal is to write stories asking the question of where you fit in the world and how to make an impact beyond yourself.

I waited to read this essay until I’d finished Intermezzo myself-which I now have and share some similar feelings. The writing is so damn good, but at a certain point I looked at myself reading on the couch and got the same feeling I was watching a tv show. But I also think there is subtle Romantic quality to this book, more pronounced in Beautiful World Where Are You, in the relationship characters have with God. That’s something I would LOVE to see her focus on. She’s so good at relationships: let’s watch someone wrestle with God for a whole novel! Idk. I still enjoy these novels on a pure aesthetic level, which can be divine in its own right.

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David A. Westbrook's avatar

Sam, following on our earlier conversation about your first review, I think this is much more interesting.

Loved this: "So perhaps what people really want is just this—this very personal, vaguely meta, vaguely essayistic thing?" Ouch. Damn, I thought I invented that! Slightly more seriously, I kinda started with open letters as actual emails to people I actually knew or thought might be interested, which got too complicated, then spent some time on Medium, and have now migrated to Substack, so it has become a lot more public.

Fantastic: "The thing is, I really can’t stand twenty-first century behavior. I hate the social media uni-personality, the rotted Tik-Tok brain, the ultra-online idiocy, the misery and the privilege and the endless self-pity. I hate it because it’s in me, too. I want fictions that are aimed at helping us lift off the ground, that get us away from our myopia, instead of burrowing us further in." Please hold this thought.

Finally, you are right about Benjamin, not sure why he thinks he is a Marxist, maybe to impress Brecht but whatever. Do you know Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen"? I think you would like it.

Keep up the very good work, and thank you!

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