The critic in winter

I was curious what you thought about all these lists of great novels from the last century that came out in the last few years. Usually Joyce was No. 1. "The Great Gatsby" is No. 2. Hemingway is way down the list, which is fascinating, because his influence had been so great for 50 years.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Here are three guys who wrote at approximately the same time -- Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway -- and they've done very well. "The Great Gatsby" is absolutely unique in American literature; it's the only neatly organized book written by an American. "The Scarlet Letter" comes close. Fitzgerald never did it again. The only thing of his that stays in my head like that is the short story "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," which has a special appeal for an old Montanan.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation and he isn't yet historical.

You described Norman Mailer's "An American Dream" as being "more like pop art than the dying novel." Do you think the novel evolved into pop art and do you think that the novel is still dying?

The novel is always pop art and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper and his wife annoyed him by reading Austen or maybe one of her imitators to him. He said, why are you wasting your time with that? Anybody could write a better one. I could. His wife said, I'd like to see you try.

He sat down and wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American, the language is British English. Her novel was called "Persuasion," his was one word like that. It was a terrible flop because he discovered that if people wanted to get a novel written by an English woman, they'd go to England and get one. And the new fashion he discovered was this strange Scotsman who couldn't make it writing poetry and decided to write novels, so he [Cooper] turned around completely. And one kind of novel died and another began.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with [Samuel] Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present and so forth and suddenly [the novel] switched back again to the sort of thing that was written about in the romances. The other thing I've been saying for a long time, and I'll keep on saying, is that the novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along. The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. I guess that's what I mean by "pop." That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

You wrote that "The tone is established once and for all in the work of Nathanael West, in whom begins ... the great take-over by Jewish American writers of the American imagination, ... of the task of dreaming aloud the dreams of the whole American people." Is the Jewish imagination still dominant or what has taken its place?

It's gone. It went pretty quickly. I say the name of Saul Bellow to my students and get a blank response. They don't even know of him to say bad things about him. The postmodernists were almost all goyim.

Which "goyim" novelists have taken over that imagination?

Well, they're gone now, too. The ones that interested me when they came along were Hawkes, Barth.

How about Pynchon?

I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off. You had to work twice as hard for half as many returns.

How about Don DeLillo?

I don't really like his writing much. He does many different things. In some ways, he never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath. I keep feeling I'm unfair to him. I talk to many people, and he's one of the few contemporary novelists who still has enthusiastic followers.

Anyone else who you like?

The one more recent novelist to come along, and he is not that recent but he's been discovered more recently, is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like. I have a prejudice in favor of anybody who takes off from where Faulkner stops, except possibly for the lady who got the Nobel Prize. I deliberately repress her name.

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