Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is AS Buy it.

It's the second of a two-part interview.

You know, when a writer finishes a piece of work that has been occupying her mind for over 20 years, to say the least, it is the place to begin an assessment of what the work is and how it works.

And one of the things that amazes me about this group of four novels, which began with the Virgin in the Garden, continued with still life, Babel Tower, and now a whistling woman, is that it is a reconfiguration of what used to be called the realist novel. In other words, it says the realist

novel was insufficient. The realist novel could not include the conceptual. The realist novel

could not include nonsense. Yes, a very great chunk of English writing is in this tradition, but what about the

rest of what the mind does when it's not totting up the accounts? Now, it's, in a sense, an answer

to what was called by F.R. Levis, the great tradition.

This was a tradition that certainly did include George Elliott

and D.H. Lawrence was its living practitioner.

But it did not include Dickens or Lewis Carroll,

the kind of writer who allowed fancy and fantasy and nonsense

to be coterminous with sense and to suggest that it's only in the meeting of the two that an

inner meaning can be evolved. It's by comparing systems of meaning,

which is what these books really do. They're about bringing together the systems of meaning

and thought, whether they be religious, scientific, familial, sociological, and to create a whirl in which the comparison allows us to get a deeper sense of what it has meant to be alive in this century.

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