Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…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. Anthony Burgess is like D. H. Lawrence. D. H. Lawrence is without question a great writer. The question is, did he ever write a great novel? He wrote great short stories, but most of the novels have problems. Burgess is the same way, but the fact about Burgess is that almost every page is alive. I’ve read Inside Enderby, the Enderby novels, three times and they never failed to amuse me. Clockwork Orange, I’ve read maybe three times. I think you’re right, but I think Earthly Powers may be a good thing. His biography is stunning, and his self-criticism and his self-discovery, plus the interestingness of his life.…

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