"Sympathy is the key"

As a conclusion to his review “The Untamed: Joshua Ferris’s restless-novel syndrome,” Wyatt Mason writes: “. . . contemporary fiction can only be fortified by authors who dare to seek new ways to tell the stories of our troubled marriages and troubled careers and troubled minds—who dare to revisit familiar territory so as to reveal it once again. As Emerson says in ‘The American Scholar,’ ‘Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.” To write those books . . . sympathy is the key, not as means of invention but as a product of one’s attention, attention to the hunted and gathered pieces of a character’s imagined heart. Sure, but all the feeling in the world won’t make a book worth reading. Only writing can do that.” [. Harper’s Magazine, February 2010, 73]