Joy Williams said that in an interview once. She also said, "All fiction can do is to just show the anomalous in life and to show the reader that life isn't as simple as it seems."

She said she wants fiction to do more. I think that is a lot for fiction to do in the first place.

When I started thinking about this, I thought about Deb Olin Unferth's "Sick of the Revolution" thingy, how that struck me, in some way, as "trying to do more" but as if the piece itself found that doing more is nearly impossible to do. From what I know, it's based somewhat on Deb's own life experience in Nicaragua, and while throughout the piece I felt like she wanted to teach us something about the dark underbelly of indigenous revolutions that "liberals" like to connect with "ideologically," it ends up saying more about "our" inability to learn anything -- to truly get outside the deeply personal, to rewire ourselves in a new setting, etc.

What do people think?