BU’s Life in Letters: Art vs. Morality
A five-part series about the year in books
A celebrated American architect sets out to build a monument to Mussolini in Leslie Epstein's most recent novel, The Eighth Wonder of the World. Click on the player above to listen to the author discuss his novel.
Boston University’s authors are a prolific bunch, having published more than 100 books in 2006 alone. Some put their efforts into fiction and poetry, tackling topics ranging from the Holocaust to the collected letters of a turn-of-the-20th-century poet, while others looked at the social and cultural issues facing 21st-century America and the world.
This week, BU Today looks at the academic year in books, beginning with The Eighth Wonder of the World, the World War II–era novel by Leslie Epstein, director of the Creative Writing Program. Check back tomorrow for “A Poet’s Other Words: The Letters of A. E. Housman,” by Archie Burnett, a College of Arts and Sciences English professor.
Art vs. Morality
Leslie Epstein talks about his latest work
Max Shabilian — the protagonist of Leslie Epstein’s 10th novel, The Eighth Wonder of the World — is torn. An aspiring architect, he’s devoted to Amos Prince, a brash American architect with a fondness for puns and a plan for a glorious monument to Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. But as a Jew in the years just before World War II, he’s increasingly worried about the fate of his people and about Prince’s unabashed anti-Semitism. For Max, the book’s central question is where his loyalties should lie. And as his character seeks the answer, Epstein was able to wrestle with a question of his own: whether a great work of art can excuse the artist’s moral failings.
“Are the claims of art irrelevant to the claims of morality?” asks Epstein, the director of Boston University’s Creative Writing Program. “I don’t even pretend to know the answers to these questions, but I can pretend to try to explore them in some way, and that’s what the book does.”
BU Today met with Epstein in his Brookline apartment to discuss art, architecture, and the writing process that led to The Eighth Wonder of the World, published in October 2006 by Handsel Books. Click on the image above to see the video.
Jessica Ullian can be reached at jullian@bu.edu.
This story was originally published on BU Today on November 9, 2006.