I didn’t set out to become a reviewer much, but I did. I was a New Yorker writer and looking for any way in which I could appear in the magazine and sell, and I began to drift into reviewing by 1960, not very many at first. They had other reviewers, but as they died off, I became for a while almost the main reviewer. I did more reviews than anybody else, and you could say I was doing too many. I did try to avoid American contemporaries, many of whom, as you say, I knew, because who knows where envy or friendship enter in and distort the honesty of the book report. So, I tried to review foreign, dead or European or Latin American writers. There was a lot of ferment and magic realism. The novel in Europe was much more overtly experimental than I’m aware of it being now. So I thought there were things I could learn, just as a reader, from reading these books, so I tried to read books that would further my own education, as well as earn me the money of the book review and keep me up.