It’s very easy — when you’ve written for those three or four hours — your appetite for words is rather diminished, so it’s all too easy to not read much, so the reviews did keep me reading and acquainted with trends. Trends in what do we do with this old dinosaur — the novel. Because the novel is a very capacious plastic. It’s sort of what you make it, and it’s taken many forms. Ulysses is — you can’t repeat that, but that is an example of a novel that really tried to do everything. So we post-moderns are faced with this notion that maybe we’re not taking it far enough. We’re accepting the old conventions, quote marks and “he said, she said,” when we had these experimental writers who have done so much. So anyway, it’s good in a way to make yourself think about these basic issues. Why are you doing this at all? What are you bringing to it that’s different? Are you just feeding the machine or are you in some way altering the machine? All these things are probably up to a point useful, but in the end you’re left with your own intuitions and your own sense of — whatever — beauty or meaning or urgency.