As I fell asleep at last, what occurred to me was that Toews' book was a bittersweet proof of this: that where the usefulness of information ends, the usefulness of the novel begins.įor this book, despite its origins in real life, is fiction. But then sometimes, paradoxically, having so much information can seem to diminish or misdirect our comprehension of a thing like suicide, a thing like grief. We live within reach of so much information these days that I could have gone on searching forever: the Mennonites, barrel racing, Rotterdam, the pathology of multiple suicides within a family. It was later than I had meant to stay up. The purity of the experience of reading the book had dissipated. Finally I shut my computer again, feeling half-guilty. I experienced the author's grief secondhand, after having read her description of it firsthand. For a half-hour I investigated Toews' family, with all that sense of entitlement to other people's lives that characterizes our age.
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