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 Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very happy to have as my guest, Chris Krauss.

Her most recent novel is called Torpor.

It's published by Semotext.

She's the author previously of two earlier novels,

Aliens and Anorexia, and I Love Dick, which has been republished recently, as well as a collection

of essays called Video Green, Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Now, I had not read her work until Torpor.

And what I discovered was that it's a completely, to my mind, hilarious recasting of the bourgeois novel, in that it is about marriage and children

and having a place to live, except with a huge difference.

The central characters, Jerome and Sylvie, are artists, transgressive artists, and

theorists.

And so suddenly, it is a completely, in a sense, new sense of the bourgeois.

This is the bourgeois sentimentalities of the intellectual art class that arose in the 80s and 90s,

the fall of that class, and what we watch in this novel is the disintegration of a marriage,

the disintegration of Europe, and the disintegration of certain ideas about art

that held culture together. So it's a novel about the disappearance of avant-garde's

political idealism into a state that the novel calls, along with certain others,

the New World Order. Now, how did it occur to you to make this a comedy?

Oh, well, I mean, like everything that is deeply serious, you know, it's also kind of deeply

...