Volume 50, Number 1 · January 16, 2003
Apocalypse When?
By Norman Rush
The Heart of Redness
by Zakes Mda
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pp., $24.00
Ways of Dying
by Zakes Mda
Picador, 212 pp., $13.00 (paper)
We are our omissions. Or, to put it more precisely, we—ultimately and alas—become our omissions. At least, if we are writers of serious fiction, we run that risk. Because literary biography and criticism, already strongly inclined to forensic approaches, are now operating well beyond the familiar territory of the standard authorial shortcomings and sins of commission, out in the horizonless region of the social lacunae discoverable in even the most celebrated oeuvres. No need to belabor the point. Here's a random sample of such lacunae: Jane Austen (plantation slavery), Joseph Conrad (race), a good part of the nineteenth-century pantheon of American writers (slavery, race), George Eliot (deficiencies in women's educational access), Henry James (the injustices of the class system), most postwar German writers (the horrors of the Allied bombing campaign).
Review, 4190 words
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