Instead of Mary or Jesus or anybody, I suddenly thought only of Anthony Powell, whose beautiful Dance to the Music of Time I was then rereading, and felt an overwhelmingly sense that this is really all we get–that if everything else is taken away, the beauty of someone’s vision of the world is our meager but abiding solace for being in the world.

Just before Forster’s novel I read Austerlitz, a book whose construction around a portentous negative space has the effect of drawing neighboring books into its central darkness, like a dying star. Everything becomes tinged with this darkness.

In America it is the privilege of the white man to rollick, even if he is a poor Jew born into moderate squalor. The black man, in this novel at any rate, can only be fucked around; his hope, in this novel, is to discover his own way of doing things.

Let’s say that my previous efforts with this book were equivalent to the disappointing herbal cigarette from a store called Groovy Vibes, or a bag of mulch obtained at the concert from someone’s questionable cousin. But this time I got, so to speak, the good shit. You eat the Henry James mushrooms, you look upon his dense thicket of sentences, his plodding parade of commas, and suddenly the text, and the entire world, come into insane focus.

One hundred years later, Modernism seems like a biggish tent. But really, it's about as descriptive a term as "sandwich;" reading the learned essays invoked, in my crude mind, a long-running argument that my friends have about what is or is not a sandwich. Is a taco a sandwich? A hotdog? It is all a darkness.

I used to feel that the novel output of Fitzgerald was like the literary version of the Myers Briggs test: whichever one a person favored was some fundamental indicator of his or her personality.

When you go somewhere new, without the funds to elevate you to the echelon of luxury that is its own country, inevitably there comes a moment when you look around and realize that you have no idea what the fuck is going on. In these moments my Indian book club of one succored me, gave context to the long days of new sights and sounds.

This novel is written so beautifully, so stylishly, and feels so American -- with all the muddled greatness and shittiness that descriptor implies -- that my decrepit patriotism pricked up its ears like it sometimes does when I read a stunning novel about America, in fine American English.

In a state of temporal foreignness, it is not always easy to read the signs of the previous century.

It is a dark and lovely poem, written by the possessor of a sinister wit.

This gets to the heart of both my admiration and my anxieties about this novel. How can we write across culture, or think across culture, even, in a way that is fair? The cowardly answer is that we can't.

There are two main narratives at work in this sad and sensational story: Sophie's Auschwitz horrors, and Stingo's penile travails.

His books are not, on the surface, about anything, and they are full of poetic flights, everyone alternately feeling a deadness inside and flinging himself down to rub his parts on the grass.

I confess: all I know about Alexander the Great I learned from Mary Renault (and how).

While Dante urged me to strive up, up, up toward heaven's crooning saints and brightly-lit pinwheels, Malcolm Lowry lit my cigarette and told me it's always nighttime inside the bar. It was a confusing period in my life.

Were Ellen Olenska on Jersey Shore, she would be the pasty, sober blonde in a ruffled one-piece.