I remarked to him that I wanted to find someone to review books for Esquire; I would suggest that writer to the boss and hope for the best. It was damn hard to get too excited about most book reviewers, or reviews—so many were cribbed from press releases or plagiarized from other reviews. I had a dream: I wanted drollery, I wanted elegance and (occasional) vehemence, I wanted someone immune from that dreadful phenomenon of critical consensus. I wanted someone godlike, someone who understood the whole intellectual history of literature and culture, someone who could do high and low but never middle: I wanted the young Robert Hughes of books. As a matter of fact, what I wanted was the actual Robert Hughes—irascible art critic and author of the following sentence: “Truly bad art is always sincere, and there is a kind of forcible vulgarity, as American as a meatball hero, that takes itself for genius; Jacqueline Susann died believing she was the peer of Charles Dickens.” Hughes, please. Get me Hughes.