SOURCE: "The Stuff That Good Writing is Made Of," in Sewanee Review, Vol. CIII, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 661-66.

[In the following excerpt, Pinsker surveys Writing Was Everything, concluding that Kazin "worries that writing will no longer be everything, at the same time he keeps insisting that it must be precisely that."]

Perhaps nothing gets closer to explaining how good writing happens than these remarks by Philip Roth's fictional character E.I. Lonoff: "I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again." The Ghost Writer (1979) is not only about the complicated turns and counter-turns that bring Nathan Zuckerman, the novel's protagonist, to Lonoff's house of scrupulously austere Art, but is itself a work so flawlessly crafted that one feels every word—down to the last a, an, and the—belongs exactly...