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The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and not even a friend listens in? No better instrument than prose fiction was ever developed for answering this question. Beside the novel…

Bad enough that our coevals write about frontier America

The big mistake right now would be to fail to keep faith with what theory once meant to us. You hear a great collective sigh of relief from people who don’t have to read “that stuff” anymore—the ones who never read it in the first place. But who will insult these people now, expose their life as se…

with the Proustian longtemps, thrown off, with such brio, in a work of history!

the most visible American inheritors were exegetes and epigones, translators and disciples