Time and Tide

I don’t come to literature for reassurance. I prefer to be disturbed. The work that most moves me treads a line between naturalism and something more elusive; let’s call it the weirdness of the everyday. In part this has to do with language, which is a construction if it is anything. I think of Lucia Berlin or Denis Johnson giving voice to states of being that tilt toward the revelatory, even as their characters experience disruptions that leave them damaged or disassociated, as if the universe has lost all sense.