SOURCE: “The White Hotel,” in Antioch Review, Vol. 40, No. 4, Fall, 1982, pp. 448-60.

In the following essay, Barnsley comments on the popularity of The White Hotel and provides a summary of the novel's plot, characters, and central themes.

I must confess to being an avid, if often disillusioned, reader of bestsellers. Popularity does not imply merit, of course, and academics tend to assume it never does: the esoteric article in a limited-circulation, “prestige” journal is more their acme of success. But some recognized stylists achieve bestsellerdom—Updike, Bellow, Roth, Cheever, Murdoch, Burgess. Further, there are some books—we might cite Doctorow's Ragtime and even Blatty's The Exorcist—which, though obviously geared for the mass market, do achieve a certain populist craftsmanship that gives pleasure. True, there are some distinctly unimpressive bestsellers: anything by Harold Robbins, or a book like Mario Puzo's recent Fools Die, which is an obviously exploitative...