Fiction Can Do Anything

Writers aren’t obliged to be compassionate or insightful or intelligent or decent human beings in their writing in any way; writers are perfectly free, in their writing, to be scum. That’s one of the great powers of the medium—its unfettered latitude, its unruliness. A piece of fiction can do anything a particular writer wants and can get it to do. Of course, most fiction is inevitably trivial, banal, worthless, boring, or idiotic, and some is evil. But none of it’s going to be much good if all of it has to be worthwhile.

DEBORAH EISENBERG