I'm still thinking about not finishing No Country For Old Men. Not that my reason for putting it down after 35 pages wasn't legitimate; it was. Those "and thens" grated, and they are not good prose. Yet I can't help thinking that I should have given Mr. McCarthy's story a little more time before giving in to my reader's frustration and abandoning it. Maybe in chapter 12 he would have given up that annoying run-on sentence fetish. I doubt it, but I suppose it's possible.

My only consolation is that I did not stop reading his work out of that overwhelming jealousy that usually hits me when I pull a work of modern fiction off the shelf and see that its not half as good as something I've created and can't get published. Mr. McCarthy has a way of looking at things that makes for fantastic reading so I don't begrudge him his success. I feel the same way about him as I always did on those occasions when I lost out on an acting part to someone worthy of it: if I couldn't get it, at least the person who did had talent.

I do hate this writer's jealousy of mine. I wish I didn't have it, that I could overcome my disgust when I read paragraphs of a published work that by comparison to mine are not at all good. I want to be magnanimous and open-minded, able to look beyond my own frustrations and try to find something redeeming in the books coming off publishers' presses these days. Reading modern fiction, on the rare occasions I have managed to dig up a work I can appreciate, is tremendous fun. I just don't find those too often. The last one I read was Caleb Carr's second Alienist book...in 1997. Yes, except for a paperback I managed to get half-way through last year, my last successful foray into fiction published after 1940 was 11 years ago. How many fiction works have been published since then? And how many of them are gems that I'm missing because I think that all anyone puts out now is garbage meant only to cash in on whatever literary trend is selling?

I thumbed through one of the Harry Potter books a few years ago. It was reasonably good, although I couldn't see what all the fuss was about (and still can't). Likewise The DaVinci Code. Both J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown are much better than most of the writers cranking out books today, and I'm not saying that I could out-write them. They just don't appeal to me. They're talented but they don't have what I need in an author.

So what do I need from someone I read? I need to be slack-jawed and stunned when I start reading his or her work, and that's just for starters. I need to be jolted out of reality into whatever world this person has created on the page, struck by a literary lightening bolt like Michael Corleone on the hillsides of Sicily when he saw Apollonia in that dress and purple hair ribbon. Only a handful of writers have managed to pull that off with me: Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, Welty, Wharton, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck. That's a pretty heavy-hitting literary line-up, I know, and it wouldn't be easy for any group of writers to match them. But they were all born in the span of less than 100 years and many were contemporaries: when Welty took her first breath Steinbeck was seven; Faulkner was 12. Fitzgerald and Hemingway got drunk at the same parties. So if that precious 100 years produced all of these amazing writers, why can't we get a group of equally talented artists these days? Where are our F. Scott and Ernest, our Eudora and Edith and William?

I do count Caleb Carr of the Alienist books as one of these giants of my writing world. And William Styron. That's it, though, for writers born after Welty. Thirty years passed between Styron's birth (1925) and Carr's (1955), so I'm telling myself that sometime in 1985 a writer was born who will soon emerge and take me away to the same transcendent place as Sophie's Choice and The Alienist. Still, I realize that I'll probably only find him because his works are next to Dostoevsky's at Borders.