We shed our sicknesses in our books, D. H. Lawrence wrote, but there are novelists like Irwin Shaw who seem able only to restate their maladies in each successive work. This sad, sterile, absolutely immobile talent has a medical dossier that reads like this: immaturity; false (or Hollywood-engendered) vitality; melancholia; concern with popularity; arrest at the second or possibly third most superficial level of the Zeitgeist; an ear for talk but not speech; a vision of love that delineates its ape.

Nothing can be done for him; there is no cure for pseudo-creativeness, and what is the point of trying to alleviate the pain of an imagination impaled on mediocrity and nevertheless obsessed with raising monuments to the spike through its breast? If the ordeal were truly representative of the human condition … but it is only representative of the plight of certain authors of best-selling novels.

For some...