Beyond that, the suggestion that novelists are just marking time when they are not writing fiction, that fiction is still crowned king of all the realms of prose, will appeal only to embattled creative writing instructors. Still, Price is right to insist on the difference between his fiction and the work presented here, although the habits of his fiction create most of the flaws in this alert and intelligent book. The subdued poetry of his novels, for example, comes out here as a frequently strained raciness, a reaching for rich, jaunty language. The stripped simplicity that is a form of strength and tact in his fiction too often becomes merely dogged in his essays, a series of eloquent but brutal rejections of complexity. More generally, his self-esteem as a skilled narrative craftsman makes him something of a bully in discursive prose.
Literature is written to change our lives, Price asserts.
Books are acts, objects, made things, things themselves. Initially, Price seems to mean it modestly, to be talking about the questions and answers and reasons that he can discuss sensibly and publicly, but respecting the rest, the private reasons, the essential but unusable portions of our motives and affections. Too much of what is precious in our lives and in our books is useless in too many senses of the word. Literature is reflection, an activity of the consciousness, not of the hands and feet. It doesn't change our lives but, hopefully, the way we see our lives.