{"id":355,"date":"2003-03-02T19:22:42","date_gmt":"2003-03-02T23:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=355"},"modified":"2007-03-17T16:29:29","modified_gmt":"2007-03-17T20:29:29","slug":"like-a-friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=355","title":{"rendered":"Like a Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will Duquette<\/a>, proprietor of a fine blog of mostly book reviews, recently praised The Passion of Artemisia<\/span> by Susan Vreeland by saying that when he was finished he knew the main character “like a friend.” That never seems like praise to me. I know dozens of fictional characters far better than I know any of my friends. I talk to my friends maybe twice a week; an author has direct access to his characters’ thoughts and actions 24 hours a day, plus, presumably, psychological insight and talent. He ought to be able to do better than I can. I would not testify, in advance, that any of my friends was incapable of committing some ghastly crime; I would take the stand for Newland Archer or Caspar Goodwood without hesitation.<\/p>\n

Artemisia is a historical character, but still, you devote a few years to someone’s life and you ought to have a pretty good idea what makes them tick. “Like a friend” seems like a pretty abysmal standard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will Duquette, proprietor of a fine blog of mostly book reviews, recently praised The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland by saying that when he was finished he knew the main character “like a friend.” That never seems like praise to me. I know dozens of fictional characters far better than I know any of […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-10-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}