[...] "successful" young writer: enthusiastic reviews; a brief life on the best-seller lists; translation into a dozen languages; and an option deal from a Hollywood producer with deep pock-ets. These very welcome developments coincided with the worst depressive episode of my adult life. I can't say what caused it, but I remember thinking of the poet Philip Larkin's line about bursting "into fulfillment's desolate attic."

Why should it have felt desolate? I'd always wanted to write novels and was now in a good position to go on doing just that. Part of the trouble seems to have been that your own fulfillment is no one else's, and therefore not even quite your own. Surely another part was that even the so-called systems-novelists I especially admired when I was younger alluded to the principal system, the economic one, more than they described or explained it: a trait of their work that had become less satisfying to me, without my knowing how to do things differently in my own. For now let it be enough to confess that I would like to live in a more fulfilling society or civilization than a self-destructive capitalist one (where, as it happens, the leading cause of death for middle-aged men in the richest country of the world is now suicide) and that these essays have been, among other things, a way of saying so. If they're assembled here in hopes of contributing to left politics, their origin probably lies in a wish to find, outside of art, some of the artistic satisfaction that comes of expressing such deep concerns that you cannot name their source.