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Laura Miller is a journalist and critic. She is a cofounder of Salon.com, where she is currently a staff writer, and is the editor of The Salon.com Readers Guide to Contemporary Authors. A regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Time, and other publications. She lives in New York. You can read more about her and her new book The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia at www.magiciansbook.com.
I review books for a living, so reading anything that’s not new is a luxury (in time) that I could seldom afford – until I began downloading audiobooks to my iPod. This year, I did all my holiday baking to Anthony Trollope’s delectable Barchester Towers, read by Simon Vance. The ironic, discursive authorial voice so deplored by modernists, the novel’s frank, almost metafictional discussion of its own merits and likely reception by various types of readers – I gobbled it all up with as much gusto as I licked the batter off my spoon. Apparently there is no fancy experimental “trick” that hasn’t already been tried by someone writing for a general audience a couple hundred years ago. None of these inexcusable devices made the scheming of Mr. Slope, the seductions of Signora Neroni (who is carried everywhere on a small sofa) or that sublime battle-axe, Mrs. Proudie, anything less than perfectly believable and almost physically painful to part with at the end. Everything about Trollope is so, so wrong according to the dictates of one or another austere literary critic, so why does it feel so, so right?
