Ordinary People | Crying for Attention
In the following excerpt, Wood reviews Guest's Ordinary People.
Fiction is full of exiles from ordinary life: stranded, marginal, baffled, sulking, deluded, or violent creatures. Indeed, some sort of snag or hitch or resistance, some lapse from expectations, is probably necessary to get any story started. If Odysseus had stayed at home, there would have been no Odyssey. This is obvious enough, but it does mean that fiction, and perhaps even narrative, can have very little hold on ordinary life, since ordinary life, like Idiaca, is what has to be abandoned at the outset. Judith Guest's...
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