The moral-fiction manifesto — risk moral passion, against the fear of ridicule

echoes

Early text: "Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important"; the diagnosis that "Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level," so that a morally serious novelist would be "laughed out of town" ("our own age’s truest vision of hell"); the resolution that the culture "wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction." — "There are no formulas or guarantees. There are, however, models." [the closing argument] [e-text]
IJ echo: The "E Unibus Pluram" / McCaffery program that IJ enacts — the turn against a fiction paralyzed by ironic self-protection, toward one willing to risk moral seriousness and sentiment. The Frank essay is that program stated in a review, the same year as the novel: the anti-rebel's dare to be sincere, named as the writer's problem (how "to get up the guts to even try").
Weight: shared-preoccupation (contemporaneous — 1996)