I’m gripped myself by a growing sense of anxiety as I say this—the sense that many people still expect novelists to conform to the classic image of people who lead a debauched life, ignore their family, pawn their wife’s kimono for money (perhaps an image that’s a bit out of date), get hooked on alcohol, or women, doing whatever pleases them—the antiestablishment writer who creates literature out of ruin and chaos. Or if not that, then the expectation that the writer be a man of action, the kind who takes part in the Spanish Civil War, pounding away at his typewriter as the shells whiz around
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