Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedDana Gioia: evaluation
7 Apr 2021 Conversations with Tyler Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire
“I think that perhaps Earthly Powers was his great novel because he takes the form of a Somerset Maugham novel, and he overlays a mafia novel, a religious novel, a Bildungsroman all in that.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Dana Gioia
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 7 Apr 2021
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Did Anthony Burgess ever write a truly great book or was he always falling short in some sense? That’s a real good question. I love Anthony Burgess. When I interviewed Burgess in about 1979, I said, “I’ve read 19 of your books.” He said, “That’s too many.” What you have with Burgess is you’re always feeling he’s on the verge of his great novel. I think that perhaps Earthly Powers was his great novel because he takes the form of a Somerset Maugham novel, and he overlays a mafia novel, a religious novel, a Bildungsroman all in that. I think it works. I think it works from the first page to the last page. Isn’t the first sentence something like, “I was in bed with my catamite when the papal nuncio rang”? To me, it’s the memoir that I think is best, which, strikingly, is not a novel. I think he’d been better off had he not been a novelist and done something else and written.…
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