I mention the exact time and location because just as time plays an incredibly important part in his story, the book itself gave to me one of those reading experiences which crystallizes you on the spot, freezing you in your chair and in time and space as you are transported. I’ll mention that reading the pages of The Rapist does not produce a static feeling—it is more like getting hurled through a plate glass window—but the actual experience was similar to that of being frozen in time, in Mr. Edgerton’s time, in his transcendent art.There is an exchange in Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa between the Hemingway narrator, also a writer, and a German kudu hunter. They are sitting around the campfire discussing literature. The German asks the Hemingway character, “Do you think your writing is worth doing as an end in itself?” What follows is a sort of metaphysical homage, a prayer almost, of what is possible when fiction works:“The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck.
