In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the American belief in personal growth and healing through literature.
Hanya Yanagihara highlights the profound themes often present in American novels, specifically the journey of redemption alongside an essential focus on personal growth and healing. This reflects a broader cultural narrative in America that values self-improvement and the aspiration to 'get better' in life, suggesting that literature can be a powerful catalyst for such transformations.
In practice
A book club discussion on the themes of personal growth in modern American literature.
It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.
I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.
My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, βAll Southern literature can be summed up in these words: βOn the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.ββ She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasnβt easy.
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'
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