The letters are worth reading, but …

… Flannery O'Connor's Good Things | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… a serious complaint must still be registered. Open up Valdimir Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire and you will find, first, “John Shade’s” poem in four cantos of heroic couplets, followed by an extensive commentary authored by his neighbor and colleague Charles Kinbote. The commentary, however, is no such thing. What purport to be glosses on the lines of the poem turn out to be eccentric and pretentious flourishes intermingled with autobiographical indulgences such that Shade’s poem becomes little more than a coat rack from which to hang Kimbote’s crazed story.

Good Things Out of Nazareth comes irritatingly close to realizing Nabokov’s playful fiction as a reality. Alexander’s commentary and footnotes are often useful but frequently divagate on such matters as the contemporary Democratic Party and Trump’s election, the poet Allen Tate’s performance in the college classroom, the “good libations” had at Notre Dame literature conferences, and even the irrelevant detail that Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin was mentioned at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Page-long—and inaccurate—summaries of Orestes Brownson’s theory of territorial democracy and Russell Kirk’s description of the conservative tradition are given, simply because the two figures are mentioned for reasons unconnected to those matters. None of this belongs.

This intrusion of politics and celebrity is the bane of contemporary life.