Beyond yourself

Matthew Cheney posts a really wonderful snippet from Lydia Millet's conversation with Jonathan Lethem (found in the current issue of BOMB Magazine):

Novels should do anything and everything they can pull off. The pulling off is the hard part, of course, but my feeling is if you don't walk a line where you're struggling to make things work, struggling with the ideas and shape and tone, you're not doing art. Art is the struggle to get beyond yourself. And if you want to use talking animals to do that, and you can make them beautiful, nothing is verboten.