But it's February, and baseball hasn't started yet, and there's nothing else to think about, so this is the season for scandal. It does bug me, because it's not true. Kakutani has generally liked my books over the years, but she wants me to be what she wants me to be, which is this naturalistic, realistic novelist. I have a vision of what I want to do, and it has nothing to do with what everyone else expects of me. A critic's job is not to tell the writer what they want, but to be a mediator between the writer and the audience.
Most critics only seem comfortable dealing with conventional, naturalistic novels.
Most people are comfortable with that kind of writer because they never quite know how to respond to anything else. I stand utterly in opposition to that. They don't realize they've created an oppressive religion that seeks to destroy free expression.