A couple of weeks before the National Book Award ceremonies, Shirley Hazzard gave a reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street YMHA. She was introduced by the poet J. D. McClatchy, who spoke of “a special shrine to Shirley Hazzard” beside which he had “moped” for the past twenty years, waiting for her next book. He had, he said, turned for consolation through that time to words by Flannery O’Connor, words that might seem to have constituted in advance a rebuttal of Stephen King’s speech, a defence of high literature that addressed the larger currency, the presentness, of complex art. Alongside the insistent temporality of what Hazzard had called reading “in all the ages,” these words set a sense of literature’s achievement as something always speculative, unknowable in advance:

The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those the critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are going to be those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be towards concentration, and the distortion that is necessary to get our vision across. It will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.

McClatchy added that O’Connor’s statement “almost precisely, indeed uncannily, describes Shirley Hazzard’s new novel The Great Fire, so long in the making, so brilliant now, at last, in our hands.” She was, he said “a novelist’s novelist’s novelist.”