Gore Vidal said, “There is no such thing as a famous novelist now, any more than there is such a thing as a famous poet. I use the adjective in the strict sense. According to authority, to be famous is to be much talked about, usually in a favorable way. It is as bleak and inglorious as that. Yet fifty years ago, novels were actually read and discussed by those who did not write them or, indeed, read them. A book could be famous then. Today the public seldom mentions a book, though people will often chatter about the screened versions of unread novels. What, after all, do we most love to talk about? Movies.”
Richard Price: “There is one thing that is more powerful than dope, and that’s movies. Because even people who don’t like dope love movies. Everybody loves movies. All you’ve got to say is Sea of Love or Color of Money, and people look at you. They go weak in the knees. Like, ‘Would you call him Al, or would you call him Mr. Pacino?’ All of a sudden you’re like this bridge standing between them and this dream factory we all grew up on. And we’re all dopey about.”
Cynthia Ozick, in conversation, said that William Gaddis wrote a truly great novel, but too late. By the time Gaddis wrote The Recognitions, the time for truly great novels was already over. It simply didn’t matter that Gaddis had written a truly great novel.
There’s no longer any possibility, in other words, of ever reaching, as John Updike once hoped, “a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.”
In college I spent many hours in the Marxist bookstore just off campus, eating the lunch I’d bought at McDonald’s; I loved slurping coffee milkshakes while reading and rereading Sartre’s The Words. At the end of one particularly productive writing session in the library, I actually carved into the wooden wall above my carrel, I SHALL DETHRONE SHAKESPEARE.
Fueled by such ambition, I was a good bet for graduate school, where my first teacher, Vance Bourjaily, said that if he had it to do over again, he would have become a screenwriter, and my second teacher, Hilma Wolitzer, said that she wished she were as famous to the world as she was to herself. When the actor Craig T. Nelson wanted to meet me before optioning my first novel, Heroes, I flew to Toronto, where he was making a movie; he walked around at night and made eye contact with prostitutes until they recognized him, then he’d wink and laugh and inform them that it was cold out, better bundle up.