Comments on Vice, (a letter excerpt)

As for Carla's book, I think it is a triumph. . . . The compositional mode (disordering invention) suggests that the Self is not the organizational focus or center of experience and not a principle of order. Perhaps there is no single organizing force, but multiple forces always undergoing metamorphoses and transformations. These forces are only loosely contained by one's life, a sort of skin around perception and experience.

But maybe it is more accurate to say there is a person and it contains forces (which is triumphant) than that there are forces but they are contained. Vice seems to me to be about the forces and counterforces that are the construction of an imaginable life, especially that of a woman--with her incredibly compelling domestic entanglements and her involvement in the completely unlikely parallel syntax of the workplace (museum).

Carla told me the other day that she had read an essay by John Updike comparing a woman to a museum. He finds them very similar--things to look at, a passive relationship to culture, sensitive and removed from commerce, etc. Which is to say, he completely misunderstands woman and museums.