““The conclusion suggests that he has used them rather than cared about them, much as a preacher uses old stories and straw men to drive home some point. In rousing our concern about the characters and events--such is our suspicion, right or wrong--he has set us up, treating us not as equals, but as poor dumb mules who must be hollered and whipped into wisdom. Second, we suspect the writer of a kind of frigidity. Reading a piece of fiction that ends up nowhere--no win, no loss; life as a treadmill is like discovering, after we have run our hearts out against the timekeeper's clock, that the timekeeper forgot to switch the clock on. the only emotions such fiction can ordinarily produce are weariness and despair, and those emotions, though valid and justified (finally) by the nature of the universe, are less useful to the conduct of our lives than are the emotions we exercise in other kinds of fiction.””
