Photo credit: Curt White
Describe your latest book.
As
Henry Fielding would have put it,
Lacking Character is a novel: a comic epic poem in prose. It is a book about nothing much more than its own happy self-development. No Trump, no pedophiles, no climate change. It is, as the French say (and I have to say it as the French say it because English has no equivalent, sadly and revealingly), a
jeu d’esprit, the play of spirit.
It seems as if we are in a moment where novels, and books in general, take a fairly predictable form: rehearsals of trauma, or “catastrophe practice,” as
Nicholas Mosley put it. I’ve contributed to that body of work myself, and more than once, in both fiction and nonfiction. But this book is my "Ode to Joy," to invoke Beethoven, because it is so much about the freedom that the Romantics discovered in play...