As an Irish-American writer raised in Europe and currently living in Texas after many years in New York, I sometimes wonder if there's an ideal place for me anywhere, or if it matters at all. Any of the places I've lived in would suit me fine, if I moved back, but if destiny decrees...

My wife is a scholar; I, a novelist. Sometimes she seems amazed by the wandering indiscipline of my brain, with its tendency to free-associate and invent. I, on the other hand, can only admire the firm, steady discipline of her scholar's mind. But I find that, as always, others have been...

  Oh Great New York, Tomb of my Youth!

    It was a discouraging time. All I had to show for a lifetime’s literary ambitions were four clumsy short stories, a few translations, and the age-yellowed reams of juvenilia. Yet, having no choice, I remained a student, of life and the...

      Becoming a New Yorker was as close as I got to tailoring an Ameri...

I don't go to church except to admire the art, but I sympathize with this sentiment of G. K. Chesterton's:

"The Church is the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time."

Actually, that's another reason to got to church: to leave the mode...

        I have no doubt about the veracity of climate change. It's been happening for as long as Earth has existed. And I have no doubt that the causes are various and changing, and that they include the toxic effects of human industry and manufacturing. But "climate change" is different from "global warming," which extends the debate from the scientific and climatological to the emotional, if not purely political: Bush vs. Gore; liberal vs. conservative; Republican vs. Democrat; First Worl...

          I was back in Paris for an interview for an interpreter’s job at the La Villette exhibition center. It was the sweaty, sagging fag-end of summer 1977. I was, as usual, nearly broke; notwithstanding which I booked a room at the swank Hotel Pierre 1er de Serbie on the elegant street of that name, off the Champs-Elysées. I planned a quiet evening, as usual (Dr. Jekyll firmly in charge): the hotel room, a frugal dinner and the train journey, sans plus. With cunning foresight, howev...

My daughter, senior class valedictorian, is graduating from her high school this Sunday, so The Snug will be closed until the festivities are over. I leave you with this observation by Elizabeth Taylor-NoNotThatOneTheWriter–the eminent English novelist, that is, who died too young (63) in 1975. "Writers are ruined people," she said. "As a person, you’re done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper..."

Too true. M...

Gustave Flaubert read and thought a great deal; he was fortunate to have the leisure to do so, thanks to inherited money. Browsing his comments and observations is like sitting down with him in his parlor, over an aperitif. "A superhuman will is needed in order to write," he said, "and I am only a man." But not just a man: "I am a man-pen," he added. "I feel through the pen, because of the pen." But what he felt was hopelessly inadequate, for (he said, sighing), "Human language is like a cr...

        Then there was a week in October of '77 during which my search for employment took me to Germany. An advertisement in the International Herald Tribune announced an employment opportunity. It was not for the secretary-generalship of the United Nations or the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but rather—more appropriately for my qualifications, such as they were (and weren’t)—for an English teacher at the Opel car plant in Russelsheim, Germany, near Frankfurt/Main. Payment i...

Memories long unvisited can startle with their freshness and vividness–and their resuscitated aromas, the fastest time machine being, of course, the sense of smell. A recent visit on a rainy day to a local Austin coffee shop, for example, and its attendant mingled odors of roasted coffee and damp streets, and a whiff of diesel fumes from an adjacent parking lot, brought into ever-sharper mnemonic focus a) Europe; b) France; and c), with that precise olfactory combination, a visit to diese...

In that year (1977) I traveled as much as I could around France. Traveling was my escape from myself, as for most travelers. With what I saved from my teaching I went on a grand old vinous ramble down France’s Routes du Vin with the spirits of Gargantua and Pantagruel and enough varieties of Burgundy and Bourgeuil and Vouvray and sundry vins de table to make me ...

Of Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), American-born English critic and essayist, author of the forgotten memoir Unforgotten Years and Trivia, a collection of aphorisms, the art historian Lord Clark waspishly wrote, "His tall frame, hunched up, with head thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs." Vestigial they may have been, but those ...

  In my five-and-a-bit years in the British Isles I’d let my Frenchness (or Swiss-Frenchness) slip a bit. But the ferry that took me from the shores of Blighty docked in Calais on a windy day in March, under clouds whipped across patches of royal Artois blue. There must have been a stray whiff of Gauloise in the air, and there were Renaults and Citroens on quay...

A new John Banville novel is as great a pleasure as a new Nabokov once was. Banville is Nabokov's stylistic heir; he's the greatest living artist of English prose. I'm delightedly immersed in The Infinities, his latest, whose conceit is that the gods of Olympus have never gone away but watch over us yet; the novel is narrated by one of them, Hermes. In the hands of a lesser artist this would be an irritating affectation, but Banville is a greater, not a lesser, artist. It works.

I pop two ...