it's hard to do anything

but what's the alternative

Deeneris via Wikimedia Commons.

The other day I was having a conversation with Austin and I said—thinking of people like James Wood, mostly, whose first novel I read a long time ago—something like, “it’s hard for critics to write a novel.” That first novel, The Book Against God, is highly self-conscious¹ about being not only a novel by James Wood, Big Time Book Critic, but also in mimicking the kind of novels Wood himself might review positively, i.e., there’s a lot of arguing about the existence of God in there.² To me, the book’s flaws seemed so intimately tied up in Wood’s critical reputation that the moral was, simply, “critics are mostly bad novelists.”

To this, Austin said, “I think you’re underestimating how hard it is for anybody to write a novel.” I was like, but Edmund Wilson’s novel is supposed to be bad… Lionel Trilling’s too… not that I’ve read them… et cetera… and so forth… And he said yeah—because it’s hard to write a novel.