In these moments, my wife is in the thrall of what 1843 and Economist writer Ryan Avent recently called flow, “the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend.” The subject of Avent’s essay is the tendency of modern work to fill so much of our lives, to make “permanent use of valuable cognitive space,” to “choose odd hours to pace through our thoughts,” and to “colonize our personal relationships.”
There’s a rich body of art that could be described by that famous quote by Thoreau from Walden, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”—art in particular focusing on the upper class of the 50s and 60s. Think of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, or more recently the television series Mad Men. This move…
Dismembering the American Dream: The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates Kate Charlton-Jones University of Alabama Press, August 2014 279 pages $49.95 Buy: book | ebook An English professor, a former colleague of mine, once admitted to me that he wasn’t much of a fan of the novelist about whom he had spent his entire…
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