This struggle to engage with the world of ideas animates "All the Sad Young Literary Men." His model, he said, is Bellow, "who was able to make his intellectuals ridiculous at the same time" as he took their ideas seriously.
"This is where the humor of the book comes from, the collision of those ideas with the actual living world. 'How do I become part of this world I've been reading about?' It turns out that the process of wondering how you do it, is how you do it. . . . What I've witnessed happen is the people who stick to it, who believe in that, end up creating that culture -- either poorly or well. And the people who say, 'That culture doesn't exist anymore,' go off and do other things.
