David Remnick's Profiles, I

David Remnick's Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker (2006) profiles several authors who spend their entire days and lives writing or thinking about writing. The need to write. The responsibility. And less attractively, the anger the author reserves for readers who decline to entertain literature outside of their comfort zone.

"No Longer, Not Yet: Don DeLillo" originally published in The New Yorker, 1997, reveals a writer with more equanimity than Roth, yielding an insight into writing that is strongly reminiscent of what Stanley Fish would say in How to Write a Sentence: and How to Read One in 2011: "At some point, you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don't sound like other writers.'"

The task of the critic, as I now understand it, is to figure out what is unique about those sentences and paragraphs I choose to study. The "social issues" in the work are secondary, though an important secondary.