Hi patcon - thanks for the comment. I can see why you would read my comment as anti-narrative. (It looks anti-narrative to me in retrospect!) For the record, I

Hi patcon - thanks for the comment. I can see why you would read my comment as anti-narrative. (It looks anti-narrative to me in retrospect!) For the record, I'm not anti-narrative. I love narratives. I think great narratives are made of engaging sequences of actions, characters faced with decisions where the stakes matter, great writing, and a persistent thread of surprise that emerges from the weirdness of life. They are enlightening and moving. (If you like great narratives, too, I highly recommend "Naples '44".) I did not find any of those traits in this sometimes autobiographical book review, which suffered from a weird passivity, and attempted to create emotional effects in predictable ways. It was more like a series of ahistorical snapshots, a medley of impressions and allusions, which is typical of much creative non-fiction being produced in universities and workshops today. Was there a protagonist who struggled? How much agency did they have? If so, what was the outcome? Did they surprise us? I didn't have clear answers to those questions after reading the piece. It left me neither moved nor enlightened, so from my perspective, it failed. You mention one of the reasons why I like narratives. They capture the paths through complexity that hint at what can be done, without prescribing rules for everyone. Narratives and case studies are one of the only ways of conveying those lessons, without over-reaching as a formula might. But, for that to be valuable, we need to follow someone down the corridor of their experience and have some idea of the context they could observe, which led to the decisions they made. Narratives do not have to be fuzzy and meandering. In my experience, the best ones are not. I think the work of the writer is to distill from life a sequence of words that intensify and condense the writer's experience when it is reproduced in the reader. Yes, you can add "for me" to the end of any sentence, and that does make the author's sentence indisputable. But I believe that when we write, we are writing to try to convey something beyond ourselves, a truth that may be shared by others. The more an author retreats into "for me", the less they are doing the work of keeping their readers in mind. The central question answered by a published piece of writing should be: why would anyone care? I care about "reading in an age of distraction"; I might care a little about Sven Birkert's opinions about that; but if you asked me before breakfast whether I care about a stranger's medley of impressions about reading in an Internet age, the answer is probably not. So part of my objection here is to the bait-and-switch of clothing a memoir in the form of a book review with a title that seems universal, when the substance of the piece is utterly subjective.