Thinking fiction

Vivian Gornick writes of Susan Sontag, in her review of the new Sontag bio, that Sontag, "made thinking exciting." But thinking isn't exciting, it's thinking. What does the word exciting mean in the context of the sort of literary work that Sontag performed? That by reading we might become better people? Reading great literature or even good literature might help us see our way through a problem more clearly--Chekhov's, it's not the artist's reponsibility to solve the problem but to state the problem clearly--though it's just as often a sort of consolation for the grief and hazards of living in an incomprehensible world.

Masterpieces are stuffed full of obviousness and subtlty, or rather the subtlty of the obvious. A masterpiece is an engagement with the unknown wherein the past is thought through for you so that you may understand the present, as it is for instance in Magda Szabo's novel, The Door, a masterpiece if there ever was one.  In fiction the thinking isn't done for the reader, the thinking, if it can be called thinking, is a presentation of a reality so acute, so alive, that the reader feels and thinks, o, now I know--this was what the world was hiding from me!

Gornick, a cultural critic herself, notes how unsuccessful Sontag's novels were, written as they apparently were in fallow periods when Sontag wasn't performing the kind of cultural criticism she became famous for. I've never read a novel by Sontag, but it's clear, at least to me, what the problem was--Sontag couldn't think in fiction, she could only think in reality.

We seem to be in a time now when reality seems innudated with fictions--fictional leadership, fictional institutions, accusations by the fictional leadership of fictional reporting by the fictional media. It's not the kind of fiction a masterpiece might be made of. Or is it? Is there not some writer now paying attention to these obvious fictions who will turn them into a fictional masterpiece that operates at the highest level of human intelligence?