Precious

This quote from Maud Newton’s essay on why she wrote a novel in lieu of a memoir (we need to justify such choices now?) is exactly why, in the final analysis, I found Precious unpalatable:

The critic Dubravka Ugresic has likened this parade of stories depicting a downtrodden but ultimately redeemed real-life protagonist to Soviet social realism, in that they take actual events as a starting point but twist them into sanguine rags-to-riches propaganda that serves to reinforce readers’ belief that anyone can overcome difficult times. Such stories, in this analysis, are an insidious, uniquely modern incarnation of Horatio Alger’s dime novels.