American Fiction Is Good. It Would Be

Silence Has Been Destroyed, But Also The Idea That It's Important To Learn How Another Person Thinks, To Enter The Mind Of Another Person. The Whole Idea Of Empathy Is Gone. We Are Now Part Of This Giant Machine Where Every Second We Have To Take Out A Device And Contribute Our Thoughts And Opinions.

... I'm The Fortieth-ugliest Man In This Bar. But So What! So What! What If Someday She Lets Me Kiss Each One Of Her Freckles Again? She Has Like A Million. But Every One Of Them Means Something To Me. Isn't This How People Used To Fall In Love? I Know We're Living In Rubenstein's America, Like You Keep Saying. But Doesn't That Just Make Us Even More Responsible For Each Other's Fates? I Mean, What If Eunice And I Just Said No To All This. To This Bar. To This Facing. The Two Of Us. What If We Just Went Home And Read Books To Each Other?

In The First Few Pages, Kundera Discusses Several Abstract Historical Figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's Sake, I Wanted Him To Get To The Plot, To Introduce Actual "living" Characters - I Recalled This Was A Love Story - And To Leave The World Of Ideas Behind. Here We Were, Two People Lying In Bed, Eunice's Worried Head Propped On My Collarbone, And I Wanted Us To Feel Something In Common. I Wanted This Complex Language, This Surge Of Intellect, To Be Processed Into Love. Isn't That How They Used To Do It A Century Ago, People Reading Poetry To One Another?

In A Strange Way, I Expected Russia To Become More Like America Since The Soviet Union Collapsed, But The Reverse Is True. America Has Become More Like Russia: A Kleptocratic Society.

Good Fiction Makes Me Turn Off All The Other Parts Of My Brain, So That I Become Quiet And Submissive, Entirely At The Mercy Of The Work At Hand.