William Giraldi
In the general rare books college at Princeton University Library sits a stunning two-volume edition of John Milton that once belonged to Herman Melville. Melville’s tremendous debt to Milton — and to Homer, Virgil, the Bible, and Shakespeare — might be evident to anyone who has wrestled with the moral and intellectual complexity that lends Moby Dick its immortal heft, but to see Melville’s marginalia in his 1836 Poetical Works of John Milton is to understand just how intimately the author of the great American novel engaged with the author of the greatest poem in English. Checkmarks, underscores, annotations, and 
From Lysistrata to Don Quixote to Catch-22, literary comedy works best when a black heart beats beneath the hilarity. The comedic impulse is always transgressive, always an alternate avenue to the two tragic truths at the center of our existence: suffering and death. Levity must be rooted in tragedy because life, as Schopenhauer insisted, is essentially and irredeemably tragic, “something that should not have been.” The clown is usually the saddest guy at the circus; we guffaw at the expense of his anguish. “I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession,” Somerset Maugham once wrote, describing how his training at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London presented him with “life in the raw” — the substance from which fiction writers educe their stories. Our shame and humiliation, our dread, our useless grasping after the divine: indeed, much of modern literature suggests that God is himself infirm, in dire need of eyeglasses and a hearing aid. The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld can muster no patience for those critics who insist on dubbing him a Holocaust writer. In his harrowing memoir, The Story of a Life (2004), he admits “there is nothing more annoying” than that characterization for a Jewish novelist who survived the camps. J. M. Coetzee has this to say: