There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.

Manhattan is not altogether felicitous for fiction. It is not a city of memory, not a family city, not the capital of America so much as the iconic capital of …

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquac…

Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, …

For tens of millions of people television has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales…

C4's prime marketing concept is the appeal to a 16-34 audience. This has some strange consequences-a series explaining Islam, for example, is entrusted to Peac…