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[...] There is no poetry, no glory, in this story, no secret communion, no mystical collaboration, no intangible collusion, between father and daughter, only pointless, run-of-the-mill human suffering. Instead of the subtle literary pas de deux between Joyce and his daughter, the truth is more pain…

a culture more enamored of prurient gossip than of literature itself

[...] Wallace goes on to attack Updike and, in passing, Roth and Mailer for being narcissists. But does this mean that the new generation of novelists is not narcissistic? I would suspect, narcissism being about as common among male novelists as brown eyes in the general public, that it does not. I…