A note just in from novelist, screenwriter, and devoted reader of the Corner, Andrew Klavan. A few years ago, Drew explains, he’d come close to the conclusion that the American novel was played out–too self-absorbed, too derivative, too removed from lived experience, too boring. Then Tom Wolfe published I Am Charlotte Simmons.
I Am Charlotte Simmons restored my faith in the American novel [because] it did what novels are meant to do: examined its subjects – moral chaos and the new brain science – in light of the human person, a person most novelists seem no longer to believe in and yet the only person worth writing novels for or about. Wolfe knows the great and terrible secret of the age of irony: when to stop being ironic.
For the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Wolfe, once again, click here.