Shimmering Ordinariness

I would say, if one were beginning to write, there are two places I would start, especially with American writers. One would be the particular chapter in Bellow’s Herzog where Herzog goes back to his New York apartment, showers and changes, and goes to see his lover. That’s all that happens, basically, but there are just some of those superb Bellovian asides, divagations, on what it is to be a man, to be in a city, in a century, in a country, of a class, in a time.... He really has that deep-sea thinking, but also caught up with a shimmering ordinariness. That chapter, which is actually about sixty or seventy pages long, I think is a masterwork, rarely equaled in any fiction.

IAN McEWAN