— When confronted by someone new at Swat, do you think you take the “flight” or the “fight” response? “I don’t know. It depends.” — Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about the awkwardness of eye contact in Sharples a lot
Jonathan Franzen’s reception at Swarthmore last spring was lukewarm. He spoke fatalistically of the social impact of fiction and disavowed the readings of his books that would point to any social messages. When he admitted that the one explicit goal of his