It was late in the evening on Superbowl Sunday. Our son was already asleep and we were in bed, the blue light of our one small television casting a milky glow about the room. Burrowed under the covers, eyes half-closed, I reminded my husband, who goes to work in the middle of the night, that the 2:30 a.m. ringing of the alarm clocks (all three of them) was going to come awfully early for him. Sure, sure, just a minute, he said. The game was too exciting. The next thing I remember, penetrating the fog of sleep like the sound of a cannon, was my husband—not ordinarily much of a sports fan—cheering on Eli Manning’s 13-yard pass that won the game for the New York Giants in the last 35 seconds.

Around about the same time, barely five miles away from my house, in the bar of the Uno Chicago Grill, where the game was also playing, a 22 year-old got into an unexplained altercation with three other men. The argument soon turned into a fistfight, at which point the 22-year old pulled out a gun and shot two of the three men.

We’ve all seen enough movies to imagine what happened next, can envision the shaky camera angles as the members of the crowd hit the floor or scramble for the exits. When the third man tried to run out of the building, the shooter pursued him outside and shot him in the middle of the parking lot.

For a day or two afterwards, my husband and I went around with a sense of anxious relief—we had been spared, it seemed, but just barely. Any random weeknight, this very Uno Chicago Grill might be the location of our occasional lazy-working-parents family dinner: four-year-old Alex waving around a breadstick while my husband sipped a pint of dark beer, Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” playing away on the Muzak.

It is not a cliché to say that we could have been there too.

As a result of this latest experience and a whole host of others, I’ve become increasingly distrustful of the use of violence in art to represent anything. I never liked the winky-winky, “it’s all just movies quoting other movies” approach of Quentin Tarantino to begin with. But there was a time when the idea of a transcendent violence, as exemplified in Paul Schrader films like 1976’s Taxi Driver, did seem to hold great truth for me. I believed in the twisted cinematic virtue of Travis Bickle’s grand delusion, at that film’s end, that he actually might “save” the teenaged prostitute played by Jodie Foster when he knocks down the door and, in agonizing slow motion, blows away Sport the pimp—played by Harvey Keitel—who has imprisoned her.

But becoming a parent has undercut forever for me the idea of violence as an aesthetic or theoretical answer to anything, the works of Flannery O’Connor and Andre Dubus notwithstanding. Rather, the violent denouement, most of the time, seems to occur whenever the artist in charge can’t figure out what else to do, the cinematic equivalent of a three minute pop song changing key because the songwriter can’t think of another way to make the theme resolve. (Try listening to Top 40 radio and you will be amazed at how often bands employ this method.)

Twenty years ago when I was studying film in college, there seemed to be something mystical and important to me about the ending of a movie like Michelangelo Antionioni’s 1971 film Zabriskie Point, in which the artifacts of a bourgeois mountainside home are shown spontaneously combusting, to the haunting and elliptical strains of the early Pink Floyd score. (I should have paid more attention to the mainstream critics, who were in universal agreement that the film was a dud.)

The violent answer most often is the boring one—as inchoate and pathetic as that 22-year old’s erasure of the three young lives sitting across from him in the bar at the Uno Chicago Grill.

So now I’m back to the same artistic question I posed the first time I wrote in this space—How to represent the solid building of human experience?

I said then that I planned later to discuss what irked me about much of contemporary fiction. The use of violence as a kind of narrative shorthand is one example. Next time, I’ll be back with three instances of much-lauded recent novels that I both loved, but which I also regard as prime aesthetic offenders.