Various literary links:

— A Tom Wolfe profile in the Guardian. Money quote: “If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before they were not noticed, now they are.”

— Graham Greene as seen through his letters.

Between these links (probably stolen from my old friend Maud, where I steal most often), an orgy of Norman Mailer retrospectives, the fact I’m currently taking James Wood’s Postwar British and American Novel class at Harvard (just finished Bellow and Nabokov, headed for Greene, Spark, McEwan, Naipaul), my one-novel-a-week goal for 2008 (having run through DeLillo’s White Noise, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Camus’ The Stranger, and Wodehouse’s Carry On, Jeeves), and my own in-progress novel (a tale of generational regret, youthful nonsense, and yes, American foreign policy), I’ve had a lot of fiction on the brain of late.

(By the way, I’m troubled by the degree of passion with which I disliked White Noise and was bored by Camus. And how completely brilliant Disgrace was. Man, that was a great novel.)

14 February 2008

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