Borrowed Lives

Book excerpt: Borrowed Lives is a novel. It is an enactment of issues of literary philosophy and criticism, including the question of whether there can be originality, coherence, and authenticity in life and art. It deepens William Blake’s point — Make your own myth or else be enslaved by another man’s — by asking whether one’s own myth isn’t also another man’s myth and by portraying the terrible consequences of taking one’s own myth literally.