143 European Abortion Novels: Documenting a Fidelity to the Milieu Jeff Koloze Reading anti-life novels produced in the United States can be emotionally debilitating. Forcing oneself to read works of fiction where one knows that the mother will abort and that her lover (rarely a husband) encourages her in the killing makes the goal of reaching the last page (usually well into page four hundred plus) an enervating, masochistic assignment. Moreover, dragging oneself through American infanticide and euthanasia novels where handicapped newborns or the elderly are consigned to a hypodermic death is similarly depressing. However, plodding through such anti-life works is necessary if I am to make the study of right-to-life issues in fiction my pro-life work. To compensate for the emotional drain, over the past year I developed a mechanism for coping with such negative fiction. When I would finish an anti-life work, I would then read some life-affirming text. Thus, for example, when I finished Paula Sharp’s four-hundred page I Loved You All (2000), I shook off the negativity of that novel’s world by reading Charles Dickens’s eight-hundred page The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). i After completing Dickens’s novel, I realized that something was missing from Sharp’s novel which was evident by the concluding chapter of The Pickwick Papers. Perhaps it is what I suggested at last year’s conference: a sense of a satisfactory conclusion, a catharsis of emotions, or what Formalist critics have called the principle that the literary work has achieved a sense of unity. Wouldn’t it be great if all novels end like one of the nineteenth-century masters? If at the novel’s conclusion, all problems