
Home Invasion
Edward Said thought the novel was innately cosmopolitan, a product of migration and the loss of identity that comes with it. “Classical epics,” he argued in Reflections on Exile, “emanate from settled cultures in which values are clear, identities stable, life unchanging. The European novel is grounded in precisely the opposite experience, that of a changing society in which an itinerant and disinherited middle-class hero or heroine seeks to construct a new world that somewhat resembles an old one left behind forever.” In an epic, he wrote, there’s “no other world, only the finality of this