A very easy move of a certain kind of middle-brow criticism for the past 40 years has been to call anything you don't understand surrealist, and I dare say there are people who would call [Perelman] surreal. I don't think so in the least. I think that his metamorphic vision, that is his ability to take some idiotic phrase, some idiotic situation and suddenly let it happen in the full garishness of its ramification, does all come in one sense from the 'Circe' episode of Ulysses. I think that this is a very important text for him, and that one of the things that he did was to make that element of instant externalisation, instant metamorphosis, available to a great deal of post-World War Two American fiction. I would think that he and Henry Miller were both tremendously important influences on all kinds of novelists, not only karmic ones...