Len Gutkin returns to discuss The Letters of William Gaddis, and share the author’s thoughts on “staying angry enough to write well”:

“A difficulty I suppose with a bit more age & a bit more experience is summoning that indignation to surface yet once more & for long enough to sustain a fiction to embrace it, so the problem’s to get one’s head together & onto what will ‘reach more people’ now the vein of sex has been so exhaustively (& exhaustedly) mined, politics done in by ex-politicos cashing in from prisons, the evangelistics (& God go with them) (& stay) done up long since & once for all by Elmer Gantry and even death itself yielding right & left, madness & suicide to a fare-thee-well. What remains? Obscenity had for centuries been the dependable component (for ‘reaching more people’) in our Protestant Ethic but now that it’s been robbed of sexual content by the beaver-shots littering every news stand where does it turn? Maybe J R was right […] maybe money really is the last obscenity & one we’re so used to handling it never occurs to us to wash […]”

Read more here.