Saul Bellow is eighty-one this year, but his appearance and manner suggest that he's at least a decade younger. He's physically spry and intellectually sharp-as sharp, in fact, as his prose has always been. His eyes shine with curiosity, understanding, and what appears to be a rich enjoyment of the human comedy. As an octogenarian author and teacher (now at Boston University), he seems much like the hero of a Saul Bellow novel, but without the cranky obsessions.
On a Sunday afternoon, Bellow and his wife Janis came down from their room in the Intercontinental Hotel on Bloor Street in Toronto to meet Norman Doidge, the editor of Books in Canada, and me. The four of us went to a meeting room on the ground floor, where Doidge and I set up our tape recorders.
I'd met Bellow once before, socially, and found him a man of great charm. But this interview was a notable event for me, my first chance to question a writer whose voice has been running on a tape in my mind since 1956. That was the year I read The Adventures of Augie March and began a lifetime attachment to his work.
Aside from the subject, what made the interview remarkable was Bellow's concentration. Unlike many literary celebrities, he has a talent for patient attentiveness. He was always entirely present; there wasn't a moment when his attention seemed to stray from the subject at hand.
After we transcribed and edited his answers, we sent him the manuscript for approval. It came back with hundreds of tiny changes, usually involving word choices. As in his fiction, spontaneity is achieved only with the greatest care.

R. F.

Question: James Atlas has been working on a biography of you for five or six years. What does this feel like to you?
Bellow: I don't like it one bit. I have nothing to do with this biography. Atlas has given people to understand (so they've told me) that his book is being written with my consent. That's not true. I did talk to him a few times, but I stopped because he had begun to publish notes about his work-in-progress and I could see that he had misunderstood many of the things I'd said to him. He is inclined to doubt everything he hears and behaves as if his informants were trying to put something over on him. The whole thing is very uncomfortable. I feel I have fallen into the hands of somebody who's out to raise a biographical monument. Unless I am greatly mistaken what he wants is a Pulitzer Prize.
Question: Writing in the New Yorker recently, Atlas said that your letters are one of the great literary correspondences, probably the last one. The phrase that interested me was "the last one". He seems to be depicting you as the end of something, not just of letter-writing, but maybe of a certain approach to literature. Do you feel that?
Bellow: The only end I'm concerned with is the end of my own life and of the mortality of people I have loved and love still. I don't really think about literary history. This is an academic way of looking at things.
Question: But in discussing the place of fiction, you have said that in the past, perhaps when you were mainly a reader and not yet a writer, literature had a certain role it has since lost.
Bellow: That's perfectly true. The novel was born when modern countries became literate. It told people much about themselves, about their nations, about their great cities-London, Paris, St. Petersburg. But now novelists are faced with thousands of rivals.
Question: At the art of storytelling?
Bellow: No, not so much at storytelling. The point is that journalists, expository writers, even statisticians are easier to be interested in, are more attractive to people who want a quick fix. What's lacking in the work of filmmakers, television producers, etc., is the sense of an inner existence. This was the domain shared by novelists and lyric poets. I often think about Wyndham Lewis in this connection. He wrote in Rude Assignment that the nineteenth-century novel had two kinds of publics, a great public and a small. The great public read Scott and Dickens and Balzac, while the small public studied Flaubert, Joyce, and the symbolist poets. It was a tremendous advantage for great-public writers like Dickens to feel they were speaking to all of their countrymen and to English readers everywhere. Small-public writers (and their readers) appeared late in the day-towards twilight.
Question: When The Adventures of Augie March came out in 1953, that idea of a national novelist was still alive. I remember that it seemed to me to be a national American novel, and the way people wrote about it was congruent with that. Whether they liked it or not, people saw in it something about the American spirit. The first lines, of course, declare that theme. Could anyone write a book like that today?
Bellow: I suppose anyone could do anything, depending on how smart he was or how much prophetic germ plasm he had-or thought he had. These things sometimes appear to be done by fiat. Somebody powerful comes along, makes a statement. The moment is right, it's the right person, it's the right idea, and everybody goes for it. But it's not as though Augie March had sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Question: Yet one did see the paperback for years afterwards.
Bellow: I started to write that book because I was up against it. I was trying to write a third novel to go with the first two. I had a Guggenheim, and I was in Paris to do just that. Everything was nicely set up. But I wasn't getting anywhere. I began to see that I was being tied down by all kinds of conventions, especially linguistic ones, or stylistic ones. I could not translate Chicago's immigrant experience into the language of Sherwood Anderson or Hemingway or Dos Passos. The language of my first two books now appeared formal, unreal. I suddenly discovered I could liberate my stalled energies, by writing impulsively, accepting the risk of incoherence in this new way. Then for years afterwards I was trying to find ways to regulate, to tame the often incoherent Augie-Marchian style.
Question: That was a crucial turning, when that demotic style was used in a novel with great ambitions. Today I see it all the time. I wonder how it looks to you, this flowing, open style, when you read it in the work of other writers. Martin Amis is the classic case. Every paragraph of his appears to be shaped by your work.
Bellow: Amis is a terrific writer. Why should I be displeased when I see it? I feel, as many writers and composers have felt, that newcomers and successors should be free to help themselves. They may take from you what they like-provided that they're strong enough to pick it up and carry it away. You can appropriate anything, as composers always did, as playwrights did in the Elizabethan time. It all depends on how much traffic your talents can handle.
Question: At the end of your introduction to Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind, you mentioned an issue you have returned to a number of times: getting rid of ideologies. You said the university has been a place of divestiture for you, where you have laboriously discarded the modern ideologies, such as Marxism, the psychological and social and historical theories, and so on. You seem to say that youth is when you pile those things on, the rest of your life is a process of throwing them overboard.
Bellow: (Laughs) Well I don't think my late friend Allan Bloom would have agreed with that. He would say, you know, that if you had started with the right masters you wouldn't have to discard so much. But we have to pass through the surrounding mental chaos and find our own way. He was lucky to have had a great teacher. I had no such teacher... most people don't. So all kinds of mental garments are put on and then have to be stripped off. We all have to find the way unaided-through the modern mental clutter. I can see for myself how much time I lost taking Marxism seriously and then...well...all kinds of things, behaviourism, psychoanalysis, existentialism in its French form, and so on. You have to purge yourself of your errors. I'm not the first to say this. And I'm not saying it very well either, but in this age humankind carries a tremendous burden of consciousness, heavier than ever before. We have more "ideas" to follow, with less ability to examine or reject. Everything has to be sorted out on the level of thought or calculation, reckoning, whatever you want to call it. Joyce's Leopold Bloom is very funny because he's had a modest education and, forever interpreting this inexhaustible world, he relies on tags, like "32 feet per second per second". Whatever the challenge, he has a ready-made answer for it. His ready-mades come from his school books or from the newspapers, the pub, the street. This is one of the sources of comedy in modern life: it is a comedy of consciousness. Everything has to be worked out in thought Leopold Bloom, another "little man", is mentally Chaplinesque. He flutters from physics to metaphysics to music; from the graveyard to the maternity hospital. "Understanding" is his Via Crucis.
Question: Ideology offers itself as a cure for all that. It's a vessel into which all those random impulses and thoughts can be poured.
Bellow: Well, what we've come to call ideology was not what Marx meant by ideology. He meant a kind of distortion imposed on thought by the bourgeoisie, their instrument of rule, another kind of enslavement. When the proletariat finally made the revolution, we would be cured of all ideology, all the falsehoods would drop away, and we would be free and intelligent and find reality at last, I don't think that's what ideology means any more. Ideology means any set of ideas or doctrines that people follow.
Question: A few decades ago conservatism was not called an ideology. It was a set of impulses and reactions. In the United States they called the Republicans the stupid party. Today conservatism is also an ideology. Do you find it more helpful or interesting than the others?
Bellow: I don't find any of these things attractive. And I don't like to think of myself as a conservative. Everywhere I go, people have made up their minds about me in advance, decided that I am now a cross old man who is a conservative. Without knowing me or reading me they treat me like a reactionary. When they come to interview me, say from New York or wherever, this is what I have to face invariably.
If I learned anything from Allan Bloom it was that all foundings are revolutionary. So if you say you adhere to the principles of the founders in the United States, then you are committing yourself to revolutionary positions. As they grow older the radical principles become conventional I suppose, and then people are thought to be hidebound if they subscribe to those founding ideas. There must be a way to avoid such thoughtless name-calling.
Question: One more question related to Allan Bloom. I only started reading him twelve or fourteen years ago, a few years before The Closing of The American Mind, and I discovered the most astonishing thing. If I reported my enthusiasm about him to a professor of philosophy, any (it seemed like) professor of philosophy, that professor immediately grew extremely cross. (Bellow laughs) This has continued following Bloom's death. The recently published 1,010-page Oxford Companion to Philosophy...it has a zillion philosophers in it and Bloom is not mentioned in it. Nor is Leo Strauss, his teacher. How does that come about?
Bellow: (Laughs) The labour unions would call it a closed shop. No outsider gets in. Question: One of the most interesting passages in your recent collection, It All Adds Up, concerns the idea of a "first soul", some irreducible core of a human being. You say that one of the things you had to learn is that many of the people one has to deal with are cut off from their "first soul". Most of twentieth-century thought tells us there isn't a first soul. How can you be sure there is? How did you come to that conclusion?
Bellow: (Laughs) Well, I have to rely on the only dependable thing, my own experience of life, going back to the first year of my existence. Then I had certain kinds of knowledge, supported or illuminated by parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, and later by playmates and teachers, that my vision of reality was not only inspiring, moving, it was sound, it was probably true. What I find among many people is that there is no soul in the positions they take, there's orthodoxy. And orthodoxy in the twentieth century has been peculiarly ugly because it has relied on militant, expansive ideologies, like the communist ideology. This was imposed by parties of the right and the left. I can remember only too well how Stalinists in the thirties and later enforced the party line. A good deal of the thought one has to deal with nowadays follows that pattern with an uncanny closeness.
This is what I find myself thinking in old age: that there have been tremendous mistakes in thought, but the worst of all was the casting out of all connection with one's own nature and one's own knowledge. Private knowledge has in it a rare kind of truth. And what I write is always addressed to this individual knowledge and judgement. I suppose among the more romantic philosophers this was referred to as a knowledge coming from our nature.
Question: Something there that hadn't been created by history but was essential?
Bellow: Something that, humanly, you can't dispense with-the salt that Jesus talked about. If it has lost its savour, wherewith shall we season?
Question: Perhaps this preposterously extends the idea, but do you believe, that had you been born in another century, the same first soul would be there?
Bellow: I suppose that, being a Jew, I have an inherited inclination to separate myself if need be from the received wisdom of my generation. But this term, "the first soul", is very ancient, it goes back to Chinese thought and religion.
Question: It would be in place no matter what happened to you in society?
Bellow: This is something that has probably descended to the preconscious or perhaps even the unconscious. That people have it when they do certain things without being able to explain why they do them, like taking care of their children when on principle they don't really agree that this is a clear duty. One has a "duty to oneself". They'd be surprised. Or taking responsibility for old parents when the rationale for sidestepping this responsibility is available. Why do they do it? They do it for reasons they don't understand and are barely aware of. So life finds a way to continue in spite of the "liberations" which continually tempt us in a liberal society.
Question: I was reading a comment of yours about one of my favourite novels, Herzog, the other day. People had criticized him for being pedantic and you were saying it was a comic novel and not everybody understood it was a comic novel. But there is a core of seriousness in that book. Herzog was warning his fellow countrymen as well as speaking from out of his own hell, warning his countrymen of something coming, something going on. Is that where America is now? What he warned America about in the 1960s?
Bellow: Well, I don't see why he should get a better break than any of the other prophets. (Laughs) Yeah, I guess so, I guess it's happened. I'm teaching a freshman course at Boston University, and among the books I assigned was Crime and Punishment. It hit those kids very hard, I think. They had not expected anything like this. But, as always happens when I read one of these marvellous books, something became clear to me: Dostoyevsky was very much aware of the ideas inundating Europe in his time, especially radical ideas. He gets first-rate comic effects out of the learned pedantry of ignorant people about liberation, about women's rights, about Enlightenment, and so forth. But he shows how people can be damaged and destroyed by "advanced thought", and that they are living on hand-me-down thought. This is one of the greatest dangers of modern civilization. You have to think to be a modern man, you have to have a set of ideas. Few people are capable of dealing with the concept-clutter of ideas. They flounder in them and sink. When Raskolnikov's future brother-in-law arrives in Petersburg, he, too, a bourgeois non-gentleman, is spouting ideas from Bentham and Adam Smith. He doesn't understand what he is saying. If you challenge him to explain he feels exposed, he fears exposure as a phoney. But so many of the others splashing around in these thought puddles don't feel like phonies, they feel progressive. That's what I had in mind, as I see now, when I was writing Herzog: that Americans were living in a thrift-shop atmosphere of used ideas. We latch on to them from need, for fun, to show off, or in desperation.
This is what I see everywhere and this is what comes between people and the first soul. I don't like to formulate any of these things. I'm against all such formulations because they too may turn into clutter. I'm simply trying to answer your question about the comic realism of Herzog.
Question: The other day I read that V. S. Naipaul has decided he's against novels.
Bellow: Oh yes. I saw that item in the TLS.
Question: He said, "I hate the novel. I can no longer understand why it is important to write or read invented stories." When you read that, what did you think?
Bellow: I thought that he expressed himself extremely well and could only have learned to do so by reading and writing novels. I couldn't help but think that he was behaving like an ingrate. It's perfectly true that [fictional] fantasy is now often unwelcome. People want to know by what right the ancient mariner stops them and pours out his very unlikely story, and why they should listen. It's true that discursiveness has won out over imaginative literature, that ideas have transformed the world. We live in a world of ideas made actual. What have we to do with all of this fantasy? Let the psychoanalysts take care of it. I sometimes think that the world exists in order to support and prove Freud's theories.
Literature is in disrepute and I think that people who teach literature have helped to bring it into disrepute. Everybody thinks of it as piddling stuff. I don't think there's any need, really, for us to kick the arts around. That's being done for us at the universities.
Question: I recently heard a distinguished professor of French literature at the University of Toronto say, when introducing a lecture, that literature no longer interests the good students. Some of them go into medicine, some of them will be doing law, I think some in philosophy.
Bellow: That reminds me of a conversation I had some years ago with Sidney Hook, the philosopher, who said to me, "There is no more philosophy, it's all gone." Now I think what he meant was that they didn't need it any more because the revolution in physics had taken care once and for all of all philosophical questions. So I said, "Well what do you do with your Ph.D.'s?" He answered "They become medical ethicists. We place them in the hospitals."
Question: But many people teaching literature in the universities report that the students aren't that interested in it any more. I often wonder whether the reason is the teaching.
Bellow: Well, it's partly the fault of the universities. But I think students feel they get all the fantasy they need from television and moving pictures. And they're probably right. The only trouble is that television and moving pictures have nothing to tell us about the inner life. Neither do the psychologists. That leaves us with novelists and poets. And even the poets have begun to believe that the novel is dead. In the twenties, Mandelstam, whom I greatly admire, declared that the novel had died. The last of the great novelists, he said, was Romain Rolland. Proust declared long ago that Rolland wrote twaddle.
Question: It leaves writers with a job to do, but do you imagine them continuing to do it in the future? Do you imagine that we will still be concerned about literature?
Bellow: Maybe not, it may go underground for a time. Tales, narratives, if they should disappear, will diminish if not atrophy our civilization. Can Homer still be read by people who have no tales of their own? I was educated by Nietzsche and his professorial interpreters to think that the moronic Last Man described in Zarathustra threatened in our age to become the commonest human type-the banal heir of all the glorious ages. But Nietzsche was evidently mistaken. He did not foresee the Hitlers and the Himmlers, the rage-filled sadists who tortured and murdered millions. I hope I may be pardoned for presuming to challenge the conclusions of so great a genius as Nietzsche. But the facts must be faced. Nietzsche did not prophesy the very worst. The very worst was not the consumerist deadhead-it was the killers who for a time ruled Europe. That kind of investigation of the connection between the individual and the world, the powers that be, not the secular powers but the other powers-you're not going to get rid of that quickly. It'll take many other forms. (Smiling) Right now it's homoeopathic medicine and nature remedies and acupuncture and massage and holistic medicine and all the rest of that: these satisfy people because they think they're fighting death with these esoteric (near-magical) weapons.
Question: You mentioned Sidney Hook. When I look at the Partisan Review from the 1940s, when you were first writing for it, I see it as an arena of tremendously powerful discourse (to use a word they didn't say then, but we say now). Perhaps only a few hundred people were involved, but the power moved out from it to other magazines and books and to society. Is there anything like that today?
Bellow: No. There was a time when you could live as a writer, but you can't live as a writer any more. There is nobody there to live it with. One of the things that the Partisan Review (and other little magazines) did for writers was give them a centre, a nucleus. But the end of the war changed that. The universities had to open their doors to receive G.I.'s under the G.I. Bill. Suddenly there was a shortage of teachers and all the intellectual avant-garde circles were raided by universities. They drained poets from New York. I don't think that it was altogether a good thing.
Question: You were very much a part of it. Can you remember when it ended? And did you notice it ending? There was something going on there, where those people all took quite seriously what each of them said, and then one day they didn't. Can you remember how that happened?
Bellow: Well, Partisan Review imported the best in European talent. Here was the first opportunity for American writers to mix with the Orwells and the Koestlers and the Eliots on a sort of equal footing. It was like being anointed, for a kid from the Midwest to be published in Partisan Review. Suddenly it was no longer a dream, the dream of joining these leaders of modern thought and imagination. It was actually so, it was happening to you.
Somebody like Jim Agee, a writer of great talent, appeared very early in the Partisan Review. I knew him slightly and you could tell how great a lift it gave him to be not only a writer from Knoxville, Tennessee, but a writer from Knoxville, Tennessee who had come to New York and was now publishing in a magazine that published Eliot and Picasso.
Question: Perhaps Partisan Review embodied a kind of universalist ideal, which is now much criticized. You apparently remarked in an interview that if they have a Proust in New Guinea or among the Zulus, then let his works come forward and be read and studied. I think you were reacting partly against the idea that we should look at culture in terms of separate groups-that we should specifically study the Zulus in search of their art. This has become not an aberrant or eccentric view, but the centre of much discourse in the universities and elsewhere. In other words, it is against universalism and the Enlightenment ideal. What do you think the results will be?
Bellow: It depends on how long it lasts. At the moment multiculturalism is a fashion and the universities have become the disseminators of fashions. They didn't use to be, but they are now, and the young B.A's coming out of various colleges and universities all over North America are indoctrinated with multiculturalism. The B.A.'s are at CBS and ABC and NBC and Public Television and they are the makers of opinion.
We always had multiculturalism in America. The melting pot was multicultural. People seem to forget that. Only those who hated the immigrants, or had some impossible idea about WASP purity, like Henry Adams, were shocked by this. Everybody else took it as a matter of course.
Question: The new biography of Emerson says that he was deeply interested in Buddhism and Hinduism, and had this incredible range of reading. Ralph Waldo Emerson of all people was as multicultural a thinker as it was possible to be.
Bellow: I think it's natural to this civilization to be multicultural, but I don't think that this means that all cultures are clearly equal. It's a crazy distortion of the idea of equality.
I always tell students when they ask me about multiculturalism that they don't know their own culture yet. That's why they're at the university. They don't take this well.
Question: It's interesting that they don't take it well. Perhaps they feel they are entitled to judge you. Do you have that sense with your students?
Bellow: Yes, I do.
Question: There is a parade of people. People in front of them, one is Saul Bellow, one is David Letterman, one is Oprah, and they are judging them. Is that how it seems?
Bellow: It does. And sometimes we are simultaneously appalled by one another.
Let me give you an example from a course I'm giving now, on the ambitious young man in European literature in the nineteenth century. We did Père Goriot, The Red and the Black, Great Expectations, and Crime and Punishment. When we were doing Père Goriot, I asked the students what they thought of the behaviour of Goriot's daughters, who wouldn't come to the deathbed of the father who had given them everything, ruined himself for them. I said it was true that he had an idée fixe, and like so many of the characters in Balzac, he went to the extreme with this; but he had done them a lot of good, and he had been a loving father. They didn't come to his deathbed and they didn't go to his funeral-they sent their empty carriages to the funeral procession. And one of the students said, "Well, he had no self-respect and he didn't esteem himself, and the daughters felt this, and they became estranged from him." They didn't become estranged from his money, but they did become estranged from him. I could see that this girl spoke with the support of a great many of her classmates. This is what I mean by the "free circulation" of ideas.
Question: Self-esteem is the key idea there.
Bellow: Odd, that these ideas should invariably be self-serving.
Question: You could teach anything you wanted. Why do you teach Freshman English?
Bellow: I belong to a department at Boston University, the University Professors Program. They have their own four-year course, and they asked me if I would take a freshman class. So I said yes, because it occurred to me that I might come between these students and the rest of my colleagues and teach them something before they got into the PC mill.
Question: You say the "PC mill". A few years ago about five hundred articles appeared, demonstrating that the politically correct movement was a disaster. Yet apparently those articles, and several books, made little or no dent on the universities in America. "Political correctness" remains powerful, maybe central.
Bellow: I think so. I think it took hold because it suited the needs of many people. They were conformists who looked radical.
It's partly a matter of quick or ready self-identification. "I'm for all the good things and against all the bad things." It's in large part a question of amour-propre.
Question: Some of your books are unhappy accounts of contemporary life, yet you are always described as an optimist and I always feel optimism pushing your prose. Where do you find cause for optimism today?
Bellow: I certainly don't find it in philosophy. The modern philosophers-even the very greatest, like Heidegger-have tried to show us that we have no ground to stand on. Their reasons are mainly historical-that is, civilization is used up. It may well be, but as one of my favourite Russian writers said, "I waited thousands of years to be born and I'm not going to stand here and allow myself to be disappointed when it's my turn."
Question: That's wonderful. Who said that?
Bellow: V. V. Rozanov, in Solitaria.
Question: Philosophers may have developed postmodernism originally, but it's striking that it has made its strongest impact in literature departments. Why do you think the literature departments have rolled over so easily?
Bellow: For one thing, the humanities in general are considered to be the soft underbelly of the university. When changes are forced on the university, say in employment policies, appointments, and so forth, the mathematicians and the physicists protect themselves at the expense of the humanities. The universities can't afford to be substandard in the fields that matter. This is a contagious phenomenon. People who have Ph.D.'s in English will say, "Yes it's true, Eng. Lit. is a lot of foolishness and we have to warn you off it"-and so they do. It's their hostility to literature that interests me more than anything else. It's as if they spent years of their lives qualifying for a doctoral degree, all the while convinced that their field was soft, foolish, phoney.
Question: To return to "the first soul". Is there a time when the window of access to that first soul closes down for most people?
Bellow: Yes, I think it happens quite soon.
Question: When?
Bellow: As soon as people get their first big dose of "the real", it's usually the end of the other thing. Business ideology, acquisition of goods or gratification of obvious drives, ambitions for money, for social distinctions-all of that works against it. And the social order works against it because it tends to close the doors, darken the windows....
Question: One gets the sense that in some people it probably couldn't be closed down. Do you think that there is always a first soul? Does everybody have it?
Bellow: I'm not sure. My weakness for the classics comes from the visible signs that there is such a thing. Even now, you go to a Shakespeare performance and you see a theatre full of people deeply moved by Hamlet and you ask yourself, "Where does this come from?" Certainly there is nothing in daily life that would support or feed this feeling, but there is something in people that answers to it just the same. And the beauty of the poetry has such an effect on them. Take the case of a kid whose parents were Polish immigrants, who didn't learn English until he was ten years old, being bowled over by William Blake. It happens. Where does it come from? Why does it happen?
Our present "multiculturalism" gives us an opportunity to see how pervasive this is, because people who come from remote places are able to take to Western culture in a really big way, like all those Japanese instrumentalists. You would think that they would be trained the way Japanese engineers were trained and would absorb from the West only the appearance of being musical, of being expert imitators. But that's not the way it is, they really are very musical. And you say, well it's a foreign tradition and they shouldn't be in this, you know they are the first generation of Japanese or Chinese cellists or violinists or clarinetists who have this. But have it, they do. Which means there is something communicable in it.
Perhaps I'm too busy with what I'm doing to think these things through. And I see the contradiction between being abstract and writing imaginatively. One thing I hold against modern literature is that it has become so much a matter of ready-mades. You read your Heidegger and then you write Waiting for Godot: immediate and direct translation from philosophy into literature. I think as time goes on this becomes a little more constricting and in modern days people feel that they are meeting the demands of the imagination when they strike a postmodern posture. I think it is a terrible mistake. I see this in Naipaul. Why is he doing it? Of course he's not consistent either, or his travel books would not be so awfully good. Maybe he was meant to write excellent travel books. He wrote only one really interesting novel.