Good Writers Shine the Brightest Light on Literature

I like it when writers speak about literature. I like it because I learn.

An example: Upon asked what motivated her to explore the relationship between a mother and a daughter through the prism of money in a New Yorker short fiction, Appreciation, writer Rivka Galchen traces the motive back to her fondness for 19th century literature. And "the best shorthand for plot in those novels is just to follow the money."

Galchen says more:

Money is the prime mover [in 19th century literature]; it explains near on everything. But only near on. Sometimes it seems to fail as an explanation, to fall down into being just a description.

Money, according to Galchen, fails to explain the motives of a character like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth:

She frustrates us because she doesn’t do what it would seem money as the prime mover dictates she should do; she seems to be made of a substance that suggests a need for a new physics.

Lily Bart illuminated!