Der Text geht zwar um Nick Hornbys neues Buch, aber der erste Absatz ist eine super Zusammenfassung, was ein Roman ist (oder eine Kulturgeschichte).

Mentalites is one of those terrific contemporary French terms that suavely reduce to a word what remains difficult to say in an ungainly English sentence or two. When employed, mostly by cultural historians, it is meant to convey a given society's worldview and sensibility, along with the more inward habits of thought and feeling as they develop among ordinary men and women during particular historical moments. In a way, these historians are doing the work we have come to expect from good novelists: delineating the cultural manifestations, practices and shifts of a given epoch through the detailed stories of individuals, and exploring how those manifestations, practices and shifts -- fairy tales, joke telling, the rising importance of newspapers -- shape interior life.