The Writer As Pastry

photo of profiterole: Tamorian

The writer who proliferates at a level that becomes profligate becomes a pastry--in particular a profiterole, which makes your mouth water when you spot it in a pastry shop window. There have been lots of brazenly profligate writers from Rimbaud, to Henry Miller, Mailer, Roth (taken to task by his former wife Claire Bloom) and V.S. Naipaul whose mistress was disfigured by his beatings. Doris Lessing left her husband and two children to pursue her career. Patricia Highsmith was predatory, sexually. Joyce Carol Oates is a furiously prolific novelist. She also writes mysteries under a pseudonym and also book reviews. However, of prolific writers Stephen King, particularly due to his breadth of vision. The Shining is only surpassed by Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge--as an essay on alcoholism. If it were a choice between Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, you'd probably ending up picking SK out of the pastry shop window. Too bad Napoleon wasn't a writer.

read the review of The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife (PW)

and listen to "Nothing's Too Good For My Baby" by Stevie Wonder