I am an author and I hate you.

Writers, literary critics, and worst of all, literary critics who call themselves writers are guilty of one fault especially: boiling people in a vat of pseudo-psychology till they can present their vision as fact. This is an excerpt of a novel by Ian McEwan.

There were things she did not know and was interested to learn. She knew little of the poet's [Milton] life, and, amazingly, it seemed that it was not part of her studies, to consider the circumstances of his times.

Earlier, the protagonist, his mother, and his father are fully distilled in an Oedipal quip that McEwan undoubtedly thought clever. Here, he himself criticizes the fictional girl's lack of insight into Milton's craft. The trouble was the girl hadn't realized Milton was not an observer of some truth, but merely an assembler of inputs and physical stimuli. And only the inputs that the critic can easily see or clumsily (and with some bias) infer.

So I'll take back part of what I said. It's not merely applying psychology. It's relying on nature and nurture observations that were very tired before Skinner and Freud took the big sleep. It's dimly illuminating, and worse, casts shadows that mislead more than they guide. But perhaps as good postmodernist disciples, it's their intention.

And why the gloomy faces? Why must all modern authors have gloomy faces? Couldn't at least one of them be driven mad enough by their lugubrious perspectives to present some variety? Couldn't one of them dress like a hippopotamus? Their undeviating frowns and precisely furrowed brows and gently tousled hairs have more in common with the ubiquity of junior highschool cliques than independent thinkers on independent roads to truth. In every instance they seem desperate to say, "we are serious thinkers saying serious things you should listen to seriously."

Unless... despite their directly opposed philosophies and manners, they have somehow revealed a fundamental truth about their lives: their ideas aren't half as original, interesting, or honest as they would dearly like everyone to believe.

Yes, with a little bit of vocabulary, psychology can support any opinion under the sun. An aside: Cormac McCarthy gets props because he went on Oprah, and no one who takes himself too seriously can do that.