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A drama is being played out in these lines, and I suspect that Eliot is thinking of another text as he recasts the latter’s drama in his own terms. The text is the Bhagavad Gita, which I had read at the age of 17 or 18 in Juan Mascaró’s translation but forgotten by the time I met Gay Clifford. The Gita’s paradoxical thesis about “detached action”—a kind of work that is undertaken for its own sake.
There is something to the way Levy writes that makes one believe she could hear, see, read, or experience anything and say: OK. She offers many interpretations, but few judgments and even fewer conclusions. Her loyalties are total and her betrayals are final.
Here, within the novel’s warped internal political economy, emerges a final convergence between Eggers and Bezos: a literalized obsession with the customer as both narrative phenomenon and market force, a figure who could put a stop to Amazon’s dominance if only they could resist the great deals.
In Axel’s Castle, his searching 1931 study of the high modernists, Edmund Wilson fretted that writers of the future might continue to become either baroque hermits or violently, self-deceivingly antisocial.
There is so much that is novelistic about Amazon. Having amassed the volumes of power and capital formerly reserved for sovereign nation-states, and having fully realized the diffuse postwar project of subsuming information technologies into commodity markets, the retail giant/cloud-computing host/t...