“What was it about Tatum that kept him in relative obscurity? Part of the problem, I suspect, is that his personality was almost entirely opaque. We’re told that he liked baseball and drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer by the quart, but little else is known for sure about his private life…”

“Most people who read for pleasure sooner or later find themselves in the pages of a novel. When I first read John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return, I was struck by the precision with which it conveys what it feels like to partake of an experience that was and is central to American life…”

“The main problem with Homer & Langley is that it fails to bring the Collyers to fictional life, mainly because Doctorow is unable to supply a dramatically convincing account of how and why they became hermits and compulsive hoarders. Their retreat into the twilight world of madness is simply something that happens bit by bit. Needless to say, this may be what actually happened to them–real life is rarely as neat as art–but it is not the stuff of which compelling novels are made, especially when they’re written in the etiolated, blandly coy prose to which Doctorow has accustomed us…”

“The notion of devoting a 13-hour TV series to the glories of Western art would now be thought comical–or contemptible–by those well-placed eggheads who regard the West as the source of all evil in the postmodern world. Among such enlightened folk, Civilisation is regarded as an embarrassing relic, painfully slow-moving and politically retrogressive…”

“It won’t surprise me if neuroscientists eventually succeed in unlocking the mystery of music. I don’t fear that prospect, but I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don’t know what it means, any more than we can explain the equally mysterious charm of a plotless ballet by George Balanchine or an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian…”

“The more I read in the literature of the Good War, the more certain I am that it is in memoirs like Donald R. Burgett’s Currahee! and E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed and the dispatches of such journalists as A.J. Liebling and Ernie Pyle that the very best American wartime writing is to be found–with a single exception. Of the countless novels of World War II written by American vets, the only one to which I return regularly is James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor…”

“The parlors of small-town America are full of novels that made their way onto the bestseller lists once upon a time. Some were dismissed as commercial trash by the critics of their day, but others were taken seriously and written about earnestly. Many were Books of the Month, and a few won Pulitzer Prizes. Now they gather dust in the unused front rooms of homes whose owners have moved the TV to a friendlier part of the house…”

“The O’Connor everyone remembers is Flannery, who wrote herself into the history of American literature by looking at the poor white Protestants of her native Georgia through the X-ray glasses of Roman Catholic dogma. But there was another Catholic novelist named O’Connor at work in the Fifties and Sixties, and for a time he was both better known and vastly more popular…”