"The First Full Thought of Her Life"

A (harrowing, brilliant) story by Deb Olin Unferth

In my Thursday post, I mentioned the great interviewer and critic Michael Silverblatt, who passed away earlier this year. As I was researching Michael, I found this quote attributed to him:

“Great novels are about the fate of goodness in the world. The novel wants to test goodness as a principle, and most of the time goodness gets defeated. Many people take it as a given that there is no goodness to be tested any more. How would you test goodness in the world if most people are corrupt or without principle or have learned principle-less-ness? I think that one of the things we face in our time is that after we’ve reversed things enough, who knows what goodness is any more? Who knows where we stand?”