Pushing back …

… Rebecca Mead: Jennifer Weiner’s Quest for Literary Respect : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Susan Dundon.)

Weiner had been particularly bothered by Messud’s response to an interviewer who had suggested that Nora Eldridge was not the kind of character a reader might want to befriend. “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble,” Messud had replied, citing other fictional characters who were not B.F.F. material: Humbert Humbert, Mickey Sabbath, Hamlet, Oedipus, Antigone, Raskolnikov.

“Novels were absolutely, positively not there to serve the petty function of helping people feel connected,” Weiner went on. “And if you believed that—if you wrote that way, or if you read that way—then, by God, you were Doing Reading Wrong.” Messud’s comments had left Weiner with “a sinking heart, and an unhappy sense of recognition. Once again, as a reader and a writer, I was out of step, out of fashion.”