It’s a book-length autobiographical essay, and it’s not a personal essay the use of personal is wrong. What writers are especially good on aging parents? Your new book is a memoir about caring for your ill mother. Fortunately, my protagonist is nothing like him. I haven’t forgotten Hans Castorp, I want to return to him. In mine, toward the end, there’s a séance he told me toward the end there’s also a séance in “The Magic Mountain.” So weird, although my sister has attested for years there’s a little German man living inside me. After “AGAC” came out, that same friend read it. So I read 75 pages, and, boom, there was something going on, so I stopped dead. He said it reminds me of “The Magic Mountain.” I’d read some Mann, not that. I was in the middle of writing “American Genius, A Comedy,' halfway done, when I told a friend a little about it. Working on a novel, typically I don’t read novels. What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? Someone somewhere would say, I have heard of it. What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of? But if a novel represents, say, how people live, ethics will be engaged. There is usually, in what I consider good novels, something at stake that may not be obvious.

These works are not morality plays, don’t have a moral at the end. Something is at issue between characters, some event, a lie, a betrayal, a secret that affects others and more. That argument underlies or undergirds narratives. I believe, in narratives, that an ethical issue is being debated, not systematically, not necessarily announced, but there is an argument. Do books serve a moral function, in your view? How so? A B-movie and a B-novel can be great camp, because they make no attempt to be “art,” but wallow in the bizarre, in their awkwardness, and magnify those flaws. I’d say, a book wouldn’t be great, even if the subject were important, to which the word “great” may be applied, when the writing was awful or deadly dull. Lawrence’s excesses because, to my writer’s mind, he bent the stiff English language toward desire. Subjectivity, bias or “taste,” inculcated by class, race, education, etc., is the judge, elusive objectivity the gold standard.

People read in a specific time, but you’re asking about “quality.” Who judges it, whose values, that is determinative. Standards shift, books drop out of the canon, out of sight, consensus changes, because that’s negotiated in the present. We’d have to agree on what bad or good writing is. Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose? Virginia Woolf, whose mind and writing overwhelm everything else, comes to help me. Sometimes I hold off reading a work until I imagine I need it. Virginia Woolf’s “The Years.” Sometimes I feel I’m not ready. Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time? “Woman at Point Zero,” by Nawal el Saadawi.

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