I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.
Very difficult to understand American audience, what they like, what they don't like. Some movie I like very much, it doesn't work. Some movie I don't like, it gets big box office. Very difficult.
It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.
The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
It's a fantastic review. Sixty percent of the American reviews are sensational, 20% are mixed, not so good.
The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.
Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.