What Would Henry Adams Say About Sheldon Adelson?

Illustration by fizzzbzzzz.com

By Adam Kirsch Aug 

 

No one can complain that we haven’t had enough stories about politics.
But those stories are almost always news stories, in newspapers or on television or on the Internet. They bring us the latest developments in the political world, but they are usually powerless to show those developments in a larger human perspective.
For that deeper story, we traditionally turn to fiction. Today, however, the best American novelists seldom write about politics, either in the narrow sense of describing elections and controversies, or the larger sense of examining our beliefs about how the country should be governed. (One novel that did, Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” became a huge bestseller -- perhaps a sign that readers are hungry for fiction that reports this kind of news.)