Read "The Outsider."

I enjoyed this article tremendously. What's fascinating to me about it is that all of them -- Wolfe, Updike, Mailer, Irving, Roth, Bellow and these two, Sindler and Simmons -- chauvinistically evade what can only be obvious to them: that contemporary American fiction that is both marketable and literary is being produced more by women than men these days. This is beautifully reflected in Simmons' description of the debate: "the knock-down, drag-out hissy-fit bitch brawl." Simmons falls into the age-old habit men have of calling other men "women" when they really want to be insulting. But of course it isn't a cat fight, it's a pissing contest, and none of them can win because their writing is elitist (in the case of Irving, et al.), derivative (in the case of Wolfe) and immaterial (in the case of Simmons). More important, it doesn't appeal to that half of the population that makes up the current majority of American readers: women.

-- Tamra Horton

I think much of what is considered serious fiction nowadays is overwhelmed with what one could call a bunch of literary game-playing.

Fiction is a game we play with the pieces and elements of our lives, changing them around, retooling them with the ultimate purpose of taking ourselves outside, beyond what we have previously thought, felt or experienced, or maybe exploring what we have lived through in greater depth.

Depth is the key. The audience must be able to reconstruct, in a timely fashion, meaning and understanding from the work. There must also be an element of surprise in addition to all that, an element of there being unexpected but relevant meaning waiting with every turn of the page.

Managing the boundary between giving people a world that they don't have to beat their collective head against a wall to experience properly, and one that they don't experience in full depth or full knowledge until the end, or even after, is the task of any good, much less great writer.

Sometimes writers get so enamored with playing games with the form, to change what people know, when they know it (often an essential task in telling a good story), that they forget that at some point, people have to know whatever it is that is necessary for the story to continue with the audience still riding the stream of discovery within the text.

Otherwise, the reading of the novel becomes merely the duty of some professor of literature who has devoted his or her life to being able to decode the material, unlike the audience in general.

In essence, I think writers should let as many people in the game as they can, and then win that game fairly. Then they have respect from the audience that is true and based on something fundamentally more concrete than a code for literary specialists.

-- Steve Daugherty

I read "A Man in Full." I enjoyed it and I think I learned something. The parts of the book that I liked the least were the chapters that were obviously the product of Wolfe's beloved "research." As a novelist, he is slightly better than Stephen King, who makes everything up. Novelists should take Gore Vidal's advice: "Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth -- or even on campus -- wants to read."

-- Sean Griffin

Recent Stories