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"Under the Trump presidency, it is easy to become entirely preoccupied with the headlines, which unspool at the breakneck pace of social media. The mood is one of constant emergency, which may be marginally better than the total cynicism that threatens to take its place but is hardly sustainable. If literature has a role to play in this moment, that role will have, I think, something to do with breaking away, with maintaining an inner life. Trump himself has no inner life. He is all externality, all surface, isolated but never alone with himself. His absence of interiority is frightening. How else to read the recent celebration of George W. Bush’s paintings than as a displacement of that fear of Trump’s externality, and of our collective longing for a leader who has if not an intellectual passion then at least a hobby. We know that Bush is no less a war criminal for his interest in color theory, but his paintings remind us that he has the capacity for aesthetic feeling that forms, to some extent, the basis of common life."

Reading in the Dark

Reviews - From the February 2018 issue Discussed in this essay: The Hatred of Literature, by William Marx. Translated by Nicholas Elliott. Harvard University Press. 240 pages. $29.95. Literature, William Marx informs us, is a "source of scandal." It is good that someone thinks so.