The question . . .
is what to make of a diminished thing.
—Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird”

One day a few years back, when I was in graduate school, a professor and I were chatting idly about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passes—writers that I had been reading lately, and that, as he told me, he had lionized as a teenager in the 19305. “Who is it you kids look up to now?” he asked. “Who are your idols? Who do you think is writing the Great American Novel these days?” I considered the question. To be sure, there were contemporary American novelists that I respected, that I read with pleasure; but none of them meant to me what Hemingway and company had meant to my professor. The fact was, I didn’t wait breathlessly for anybody’s next novel; there was no magnificent vision, no grand style out there that had changed my life. “Nobody,” I said, and was myself surprised—and more than a little dismayed—that this should be my answer. He nodded grimly, as if he’d expected nothing else—indeed, as if he’d asked the question precisely in order to confront me with my own reply.

It was not—and is not—a pleasant verdict to render. But there it is, like it or not: the American novel has lost a good deal of its prewar glory; it doesn’tmatter quite so much anymore; it is no longer the flagship of the American arts, the most conspicuous of the mirrors we hold up to