The Transformers
Novelist Lydia Millet homes in on the varieties of existential experience
MINNA PROCTOR
Butterflies flapping, according to students of chaos theory, can start typhoons. Carbon emissions make New York a city where tornadoes touch down. Social networking starts (or doesn’t start) political revolutions. Where does literature fit into all of that? Are its effects fleeting, important, transcendent, or trivial? What could possibly be the point of some well-built sentences that flower in the imagination, perhaps ignite a dinner conversation, and then fade with the next cell-phone bill, sinus infection, or rescheduled dentist appointment? After all, as Muriel Spark’s doppelgänger in Loitering with Intent explains about one of her literary creations, he “never existed, he is only some hundreds of words, some punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, marks on a page.”
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Stay tuned for more Lydia Millet. TLR’s Fall/Winter 2011 issue, The Lives of the Saints (due out mid-December) features an in depth interview with the author by René Steinke.