Writer's Diary
11/24/25
Opening a page of Girard’s The Scapegoat at random: “The borderline between rational discrimination and arbitrary persecution is sometimes difficult to trace.”
I have a weird feeling that metaphysics, physics, and Christianity will converge one day.
When I read, I think: does this give me the freedom to change?
When I can’t focus on a book that I know is wise and good, I think this is distraction and excuse not to, in some way, evolve?
vote for my novel is this serialized novel contest (it’s a finalist)
It is simultaneously a sign of the decline of the novel and the decline of economic and social opportunity that people 40 and under—or worse, 50 and under—have so little hope of earning a wage commensurate with the price of houses, while people 50 and over, by and large, own one or more houses valued at double, triple, quadruple, or quintuple their original purchase price. Consequently, fewer and fewer people are able to start and support families.
There are no great novels, no great sagas, that approach this fact. There seems to be a taboo against really acknowledging—beyond tweeting about—Boomers and the deep generational schisms and the portent of economic catastrophe. The utter security of elders and the utter insecurity and desperation of the younger should mean something, should find some kind of permanent symbolic, crystallized form. There should be more art that takes historical change seriously.
The failure to create meaningful narratives, to fictionalize and partake imaginatively in the transformation of American life over the last 60 years—to produce a Tolstoy and a War and Peace, Thomas Mann and a Buddenbrooks, or a novel like Lawrence’s The Rainbow (or Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, even Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy tracking post war decline)—suggests that what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism, or the culture of therapeutic self-help (what we might now simply understand as Boomer culture writ large), is now so universalized, so pervasive, that even Millennials, who are subject to, and victims of, these larger architectonic transformations, can only represent their experience in terms of self-lacerating autofiction and self-aggrandized therapeutic whining about mental health (often brilliant sentences which do not accumulate into a comprehensive vision, or wisdom).1