Recondite

Sherman Oaks, California

Actual exchange between Michael Silverblatt, the host of KRCW's Bookworm program, and novelist Diane Johnson.

Silverblatt: "Now, if the English novel, even as late as Aldous Huxley, can be thought in a sense of a kind of either travelling show or country house novel, and the American novel can be thought to be the story of a naive dealing with an impossibly older civilization, what does the movement to the Middle East and North Africa do to the possibility of writing novels?"

Johnson: "That was the challenge, absolutely...."