In the rawness of the emotional bonds that Michael McDowell's saga portrays, in the darkness and mud of its waters, we are allowed to splash around with our own dramas and at the same time emerge unscathed. We like to read stories about shitty families because it's easier to call them, what do I know, a thief!, or...
a pedophile!, or maybe... a liar! to a fictional father hidden there between the pages of a fascinating novel. In his European literature courses, Vladimir Nabokov says that the true talent of a reader is to distance himself from the work he reads, so as not to gamble everything on the odious card of identification. It is likely that this abundance of “self-familiarisms” that are foreign to all fiction has left us a little choked up lately, and that is why we are voraciously returning to more or less pure fictions, with which we can distance ourselves, while satiating ourselves with an identification.