Anti-Social Novels

This past week, I attended “My Own Worst Enemy” and “Reality Bites.” I am going to blog about the second panel.

I found the papers on this panel extremely interesting. The paper on In Cold Blood especially caught my attention—the idea that nothing can ever be 100% representative of reality is something that I have thought about before, and I was delighted to hear about it in the context of the book. Another paper, on Into The Wild, also interested me. The student who wrote it pointed out that to be able to survive in the wile, Chris McCandles actually had to rely on things produced by society—he is always carrying a backpack full of things and uses cars to get around.

What I found most interesting, though, came in the question portion of the panel. The idea of an anti-social book came up. One student, while talking about his paper—written on DeLillo’s Players—said  that sometimes a book—his in particular—is too busy reflecting on itself that it fails to reflect anything about the outside world, and thus, fails to connect with the reader. He says this makes it “anti-social.” The student concluded that there is little value in this, and wondered why the author bothered to publish it if it was a book written basically only for himself.

--Francesca