Milan Kundera once admitted in a conversation with René Girard that if he had read the latter’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel before having honed his craft, it would have given him writer’s block. It’s easy to see why: once the secret of great literature is revealed to be its insight into the imitative nature of desire, writers in the know may feel relegated to merely reverse engineering the novel rather than experiencing the writing process as a sort of natural birth. Trevor Merrill, a student of Girard’s at Stanford, overcame the agony of influence, and with Minor Indignities, earned the distinction of having proven his master wrong.
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