Laura asked Robert Earle:

Actually that is exactly what I did Robert. I fell in love with an Asian immigrant, who was deported, I followed him back to his own country. He and I struggled for two years with authorities to return him to the country where we lived together, and were finally successful. For me to read The Pickup is to see my own life in Fiction. Why do you find it so difficult to credit?

Robert Earle I think your personal story is wonderful and I hope it keeps going for a long time. In The Pickup there seems to be a necessary, radical erasure of a person's identity in return for a total immersion in an aesthetically barren and alien existence. There's a literary genre referred to as captive narratives; this isn't a captive narrative; but in such works, personalities (or "characters") do sometimes completely flip into strange cultural modes. Lord Jim by Conrad addresses this phenomenon, too. In that case, as I recall, Jim's naivete facilitates credibility. Anyway, my review was just one reader's assessment of a work of fiction that lost its power to convince and became, it seemed, a forced argument for accepting otherness.

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