“Irony is a fickle mistress. There was a time when an author couldn't get a book published in this country without a heady dose of the stuff. Now there's a million-dollar market for literalist (but no less bodacious) claptrap about adultery or impending nuclear holocaust, for those who aren't up to *Madame Bovary* or *A Childhood's End*. Music, meanwhile, has performed an inverse about-face: Where ”
