Can a great novel also be a bestseller?
ES: Yes, and all seven of the books we are reading have been bestsellers as well as critically successful. For example, we’re reading Don DeLillo’s “White Noise.” DeLillo has written a number of novels, and some of them are more highly regarded by academics and critics than this one. But “White Noise” is the one that I think everybody agrees is his breakout book — it was the book that first reached a really wide audience and remains the book that is the most popular with general readers. At the same time, it breaks new ground aesthetically and thematically, and influenced many younger writers. Is it harder to write a classic novel today? ES: I don’t know if it is harder to write a classic novel than it ever was, but I certainly think it’s harder for a novelist to get attention. The extraordinary changes in publishing, in marketing and distributing books made the novel’s fate much more complicated than it was a century ago. We’re actually living in a golden age of fiction, but the nove
