In case you wondered …

… The importance of fiction in modern times | Howard Jacobson. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Take the example of Tolstoy. The evangelist in him rubbed his hands when he read in a paper of a rich society woman’s disastrous affair with a cavalry officer and her subsequent death under the wheels of a train. Here was a biblical injunction to ram home. Thou shalt not commit adultery! But the novelist trumped the puritan and executed the most sympathetic of all studies of the erotic imperatives of love. Such victories of the involuntary over the willed aren’t inevitable: what matters is the war.