Quite radiant

     Any Sunday worth the name should include time spent sprawled on the sofa with the Sunday papers. 

     But this Sunday saw a house full of family, here to see my sister. My brother and his wife stopped by bearing a shopping bag filled with peppers from their garden. My son and daughter-in-law brought their dog Virginia and my grandson. My wife grilled up an excellent flank steak, the baby was passed around and admired, and a good time was had by all. 

     So the papers didn't get read. Nothing is perfect. When Monday morning I found myself going to Hyde Park again — second time this week, to the University of Chicago, something you'll read about tomorrow — I grabbed the Times Book Review to read on the train. I figured, the news could wait. 
     The section included A.O. Scott's review of "The Radiance," by Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Scott calls the book "autofiction," a term I hadn't heard before — not stories about cars, but a fiction/nonfiction blend about "a man named Ayad, who shares many traits with the real-world Akhtar."       

     While Scott couldn't quite tell what he was reading — "Is this a campus comedy? A novel of ideas" A medical mystery? A spiritual quest narrative?" — the bottom line is, he liked it. "Whatever this book is, it's alive."
     But that's not why I'm sharing this with you. The campus section draws this description. "Ayad's class is stocked with the kind of overmedicated, trauma-curious, identity-obsessed youngsters who have figured in countless op-eds and magazines stories over the past couple of decades. The fluctuating power dynamic between them and their instructors, and the overall climate of hypersensitivity, ideological conformity and bureaucratic surveillance that hovers over the college, are by now commonplaces of fiction and creative nonfiction alike."

     Scott might read a lot more than I do, so he seems to think these are stock descriptions. To me, they don't seem very commonplace at all — certainly not nearly commonplace enough — and I wanted to share them. Identify-obsessed. Hypersensitivity. Ideological conformity. It is really refreshing to see someone just come out and say it.