If This Is a Man

In 1978, the year I declared my English major at Berkeley, the writers I most admired weren’t even English. Around the hilly campus, I carried Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum . Though both novels depend on stylized history, that seemed a background pleasure, upstaged by the imaginative bonanzas of their narrative circus trains.

One felt their influence everywhere, trickling down even into the undergraduate Introduction to Fiction workshops, where tales of human flight abounded and even I, a cautious 19-year-old, began a novel that featured a scarecrow and children with thalidomide fins serving dinner in a strange coastal hotel. Now, more than a quarter century later, I no longer carry thick novels. The challenge to the primacy of the novel as the product from which we glean nuance and complexity unavailable from the harder disciplines is not (as it seemed for ...