A work of art created with any degree of seriousness, over a protracted period of time, reflects, in various rippling quivering layers, the selves that constituted the writer during the period of composition. At the point at which we see ourselves we are no longer the selves we see. Reading reviews and criticism is, then, for the writer, always distracting. But then they are not really written for the writer's eye. And the uncomprehending and dismissive and occasionally malicious notices are too discouraging.
Novelists are the most pragmatic of people.
Moralizing, visionary, and skeptical impulses contend in most writers, pulling a work in one direction, and then in another. But in reality, in the existential unfolding fact of the work, it is always something else, something indefinable. Or he may have ached to employ, for decades, a certain stretch of sandy soil by a railroad track, where yarrow, blackeyed-Susan, and Queen Anne's lace grew . . . They are absorbed into the texture of the work and cannot be extracted from it. Apart from the paraphernalia of professional reviewing and criticism, apart from the dizzying phenomenon of mirrors reflecting mirrors, one does hope, however quixotically, for the ideal reader.