I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.
I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.
I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.
There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.