imbroglio

I'm back from spring break, and I find myself in an imbroglio. Not one, to be sure, from which I won't be able to extricate myself by discarding both dignity and comfort, but an imbroglio all the same. To wit: I have to write a two-page paper on Pride and Prejudice by the esteemed High Priestess of English Literature, Jane Austen, by tomorrow morning, and another five-page paper on the self-same novel by Thursday. I am now, like Mark Twain, convinced that it is a great pity indeed that Miss Austen was permitted to die a natural death. The instructor for this class, normally pleasant and levelheaded, was asking too much of me when she implored me to give Austen a chance. A book like Pride and Prejudice ought not to be permitted within two miles of a classroom - let alone a college-level writing class in which not one student, by a show of hands, was found to be an English major.

On the other hand, I bought Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut at the airport on my way back, and have read a third of it already. People like K. V. and G. V. really make me revise my opinion that all American writers are like David Baldacci and Dan Brown. Even one such as Stephen King, who distinguishes himself by the originality and imaginativeness of his plots, is guilty of aspiring to that register of demotic American English that neither he nor anyone in the real world, ironically, ever uses. It's a pity. Well, Kurt Vonnegut, at any rate, is a writer of literature - not just any sort of writer. That much is clear.

It's a pity he died. It's a pity G. V. died. Now there is no one alive who, to my knowledge, can be called a writer of literature.