Perhaps Kushner has answered this himself, through his paraphrase of Plato: “People shouldn’t trust artists and they shouldn’t trust art.” But many do. To what extent do artists who introduce this blurring of reality and fantasy in their fiction contribute to acceptance of the blurring of truth and falsehood by communicators in advertising, business, politics, and other venues? Consider this question both from the standpoint of the educated and the naive public.

One was Mr. Doctorow’s revelation about using a child’s perspective to approach morally or legally ambiguous situations. Really stunning, in the sense of being one of those genius ideas that’s so elegant and simple, yet could still take someone years (or 150 pages) to think of or stumble upon.

Another thing (touched on by both Mr. Doctorow and Mr. Kushner) that never really occurred to me before, even though in retrospect it’s one of the unifying characteristics of my all-time favorite books and movies, is the way that multiple perspectives and shades of grey can be so much more effective than absolutes when you’re attempting to aestheticize something as complex as reality. Even in the case where you’re dealing with a moral absolute, like the evil of the Holocaust. In fact, looking back, that’s precisely what made reading Malamud’s The Magic Barrel such a revelatory experience for me (and it was) — the thing was filled with surprising protagonists, unsympathetic victims, and all sorts of characterization curveballs.