The September 28th issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article on Barbara Kingsolver, an author whose books I love, especially The Poisonwood Bible.  Because I love her books, I’m intrigued.

She says: “A poem is like a unicycle, “balancing one idea,” but her novels are more like station wagons, crammed full of them.” 

She points out we’re not wired for all the suffering we’re absorbing as we read the daily news stories. “There are limits to the human mind, a limit to the number of people the human animal evolved to care for.” The novel is the antidote to this.

“Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them – as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling. We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.”  “A novel isn’t a few seconds and then on to something else – the hodgepodge of randomness, equating things that are not equivalent. A novel brings you into the one-to-one, the intimacy of human relationships and human conflicts, for hours at a time.”