Why not Dr. Seuss’ wisdom? Here goes: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” In a word, yes.

Recently I discovered the fiction of British novelist Jeremy Cooper. In my view, his writing is akin to Patrick deWitt’s, especially in deWitt’s novel, The Librarianist, and Walker Percy’s excellent novel, The Moviegoer.

Brian (the novel) is about a solitary reader who becomes an avid, one might even say obsessive, moviegoer and cinephile. The story involves how film enables him to break out of his emotional carapace to embrace others, to get out of himself and care about others in actuality, not just emotional posing/virtue signaling.

Like some erstwhile English literary fiction writers, Cooper can be sometimes efficacious via his literary understatement; at other times, he clearly reveals a desire to virtue signal to the Spirit of the Age, especially regarding sexuality and even, dare one even mention it, a former (and likely returning) president of America. It seems even as gifted a writer as Cooper sometimes is in this novel, he cannot resist genuflecting to the Leftists who cannot view anything without going through a lens of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). All in all, however, it (Brian) remains a worthwhile read.