confidence tricks

"More than a few people have asked me in the past year how I explain the enormous popular success of Robert James Waller's Madison County books, Although I haven't read either The Bridges of Madison County or Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend. I answer with full confidence: They are selling the reader a fantasy of individuality and freewheeling independence. . . "
-- Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegeies, p. 203