Welcome back to Young Heretics, a production of the Clavin Family Literary Mafia,

where together we are not so secretly engaged in the project of both saving and creating Western civilization.

Okay, at this point the Clavin family literary Mafia is only a little bit a joke.

I spent this weekend reading not one not two but three novels two of which were written by family members of mine, although one of those family

members is not related to me. It's a whole thing, it's very complicated, but I'll explain

it on Twitter. The first novel that I read this weekend is called The House of Love and Death.

It's by my father Andrew Clavin, No Relation, and it's the third in the Cameron Winter series of detective novels. The second one I read is called

Christmas Carol and it's my sister's book which I started a while back and now have

finished we're gonna have both my sister and my dad on the show respectively to talk about their books, but as I was reading through these novels, besides feeling enormously proud of these people whom I love because I think they've

both accomplished something really spectacular in these books, I was also reflecting on them as

works of art and as pieces of literature unrelated to the fact that they're my dad and my sister

and it struck me that both of these books are profoundly moral books in the most literary sense of the term.

That is to say these are not books that preach at you.

They're not, neither of them is non-fiction, they're both fictional works, and so they're not treatises

on morality on how you should live, and they're very understated in the way that they get

their ideas across, but like all good works of literary fiction,

they do contain moral truths, moral realities, and they contain certain moral realities that can only be unfolded in narrative form.

The kind of thing that if you could have just stated outright, you would have done that, you wouldn't have written a a novel these are things that need to be gotten across at an emotional level at a narrative level

They need to be dramatized and placed into a kind of story world because that's how you can say to people it's sort of as if this

were going on right that's what fiction is all about it's it's about imagining

as if and so in Facebook, for example,

that it's a retelling of Charles Dickens,

...