Where’s The “There” There?

Is “place” important to novels anymore? A group of Canadian literary types sit down to debate the question: “The commodification of place is so prevalent that even non-fiction writers, such as Pico Iyer, have based their careers on it. Read between his clever phrases and glib descriptions of a city in Bolivia or a Toronto street and his point is almost always the same: We’re living in a global village now and there’s no “there” anymore.”