In a New Yorker "Cultural Comment" column today,
Richard Brody describes a 2004 novel that he says …
"… dramatizes the American character as
vast, manifold, and inchoate;
it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy
for good or for evil, and it shifts
under the sudden force of unforeseeable events.
The shifts and pivots of the American nation
at large are also those of each individual American.
The grand political stage and the intimate life
are inseparable; identity itself is inextricable
from the currents of history. The novel’s
mighty psychological weight rests upon
a terrifyingly delicate balance of circumstances
that depend on whims of chance."
I prefer the shifts and pivots in earlier fictions; for example,
those of Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988.
Some backstory : Glory Road in this journal.