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INTERVIEWER
Do you think there’s a trend for novelists to write journalism, as Norman Mailer does?
CHEEVER
I don’t like your question. Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can’t write a story. You might as well give up. In many cases, fiction hasn’t competed successfully. These days the field of fiction is littered with tales about the sensibilities of a child coming of age on a chicken farm, or a whore who strips her profession of its glamour. The Times has never been so full of rubbish in its recent book ads. Still, the use of the word “death” or “invalidism” about fiction diminishes as it does with anything else.
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| Related Links |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Jean Cocteau, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Guido Cavalcanti, Raymond Chandler, E. E. Cummings, Dante, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shirley Jackson, Irving Wallace, Émile Zola |
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