For a long time, we have been hearing that the English novel is dead but that American novel is okay. Barbara Pym is good but Rushdie is bad and vice versa. A new twist is that we are still waiting for major literature. Suddenly, there is a clue. I think that we are up against our old friend, the Utopian itch which can be defined as jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today.
Excellence is said to be in the past or future.
It is always elsewhere, never here. Margaret Salinger and her brother, Matt, lived alternately with their father and mother after their divorce. Her memoirs are likely to widen the rift between her father, who has refused to co-operate in the book, and brother, who says, I guess she has a lot of anger but to write a book about it isn't right. J.D. Salinger, whose 1951 debut novel about a prep school drifter virtually invented the angry young man, has published nothing since a volume of stories from The New Yorker in 1963. Now age 81, he lives in isolation in New Hampshire.