Forgive the intrusion, please. I need a word.

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> What's the name for a novel that answers all your past confusions,
> uncertainties misconceptions, guilts about yourself and everybody else,
> thereby literally changing your  life and supplying debating points for
> every occasion imaginable?
> 
> Answer: Gravity's Rainbow.

For me, it was *The Brothers Karamozov*

I was just sixteen years old.  I took a course in Russian novels.
Although I was a veracious reader of what was considered great
literature I was not quite prepared for Dostoyevsky's sense of humor and
irony. I thought noone could write a better novel than the Brother K. I
read Tolstoy's Ana K. and thought this is even better.  We read Tugenov,
that was it I thought, I won't read these damned Russians. I thought
Dickens and Hardy were more to my straight didactic impulses, but I was
dumbfounded by Jude the Obscure. The first Modern novel! Try some
females I thought, Jane Austen, more Aristotelian, but too much  drawing
room  wit and irony. Back to the men, well I thought George Eliot was a
man. Ah! Middlemarch, noone can write a novel like George Eliot, I was
convinced. I was afraid of Virginia Woolf and so I crawled into bed with
the Russian Oblomov, a stiff three volume set of Proust soft and silver
on the shelf. With a Barbie Doll Anna K. bleeding on the tracks and Boby
Dylan whining poetic in my ears I took a course on Ibsen. Imagine the
guilt when we read "A Doll's House." No punishment could fit the crime.
I had planned to kill an author but murdered a character with a toy
train and noone cared. Meanwhile, authors were dropping like canaries in
the coal mine of post new critical labor strikes. I'd had it with
novels. Malt does more than Milton can to justify our misdeeds toward
our fellow men. Ale man, ales the stuff to drink for fellows who would
rather get drunk than think or read novels. But Irish pubs are dens of
iniquity and slurred poetry.  To the Romantics. Milton, Milton,
Milton...these guys were obsessed with Milton and Satan. Milton it is, I
thought. Noone has ever written a better epic than PL, a better elegy
than Lycidas. And that's how I came to realize or suspect
that novels are not the answer to all your past confusions,
uncertainties misconceptions, guilts about yourself and everybody else.
Milton is.