Booker ends his 700-page treatise with a diatribe against literature of the past two centuries. Modern fiction has "lost the plot," he argues. Moby-Dick initially may look like a heroic Overcoming the Monster tale, but in the end we do not know who is more evil, Captain Ahab or the whale who kills him. While the ambiguities of modernism trouble Booker, some of his readers will be even more disturbed to find "E.T." and Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies extravagantly lauded in a book that disparages the complex moral pessimism of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" and the achievement of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past , which he dismisses as "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:54 AM  |