Allegory. Allegory. Yes.

I’m just going to pretend that’s wink-nudge irony. ‘Cause otherwise it may be the silliest, most incompetent & superficial stand-in for criticism I’ve stumbled on in a while. I’m not trying to get ad hominem here, but we’re talking about basic tenets of literature. Fiction as a means of non-literal truth. Sarvas is looking like a poster child for the empirical age. And literature ain’t realistic. Let’s get that out of the way–all fiction is as impossible as a literate rat; some is just more subtly so. If you’re getting hung up on simple conceits introduced in kid’s lit, I don’t know that you ought to graduate to the Big Boys’ & Girls’ shelf just yet.

Hell, if we really want to get into it, there may be a moral dimension to stories with aggressively alien/unfamiliar/impossible protagonists and situations. Not that such works are necessarily didactic; rather, they’re exercises in the empathic leap. Look at the mind-hopping daemon-parasite-thing in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I think that novel deals somewhat with the idea of empathic challenges.

At bottom (in the final analysis), the screaming problem with Sarvas’s criticism is his angle of attack. Had he said, “Savage doesn’t convince me that THIS rat thinks, feels, writes, drives cars, does meth,” then whatever. Fair enough. Tell me why. But he suggests–whether deliberately or by virtue of lazy writing; probably the former–that impossible narrators/protagonists are a fundamental, objective flaw which any work will have to strive hard, and probably in vain, to overcome. As you pointed out, a quick glance at any bookshelf just doesn’t bear that out (in spite of Sarvas’s grinning, pretentious opening paragraph).

To be clear, as I said:

I did not care about Firmin because he is (I believe) a rat.

I did not like the book because I found its twee execution cloying beyond belief. But it appears, predictably, that differences of taste with you are not allowed. (None of the other animal stories you note are similarly cutesy.)

And I know the rat does not talk; I meant “talk” to us, to the readers, via the narration – which I admit is a sloppy and misleading formulation.

Mark

And while we’re on the subject, underwear hurling is not permitted in Hamilton County by order of Sheriff Simon L. Leis, Morality Gestapo Oberfuher. I live in Clermont County, where we’re allowed to throw anything we want.

They had him on WLW here in Cincy yesterday, which means it was a slow news day in the Queen City.

Is it any wonder I moved to the ‘burbs and am seriously pondering moving to Chicago?