that's the fate of all lecturing and politicized fiction and I think Nabokov summed up very well what is wrong with it: [...] I am neither a reader nor a write

that's the fate of all lecturing and politicized fiction and I think Nabokov summed up very well what is wrong with it: [...] I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster [...] Doctorow and quite a few contemporary sci-fi writers are very strong offenders on this front.