And, finally, literature cannot be saved, because literature saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer literature. Perhaps it was once and has lost its relevance; perhaps it never was; the distinction is one we can and should argue about, and if we don’t reach a conclusion that’s a good sign, because a book about which everyone in the culture says the same thing has lost its ability to say anything about the culture—just as a literary classic, to borrow a phrase from the beleaguered Mark Twain, “is a book that everybody talks about but which no one has read.”