Dwight Garner’s provocative challenge in last week’s Times magazine to novelists who publish infrequently,
If you and your peers wish to regain a prominent place in the culture, one novel a decade isn’t going to cut it.
is more than a little short-sighted. Did James Joyce forfeit his influence on literature, his place as a modernist, for publishing only two books in the 23 years after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? (Granted, all three works were serialized first, à la Charles Dickens.) Do we think less of Ralph Ellison for never publishing his follow-up to Invisible Man?
And yet, Garner makes a good point. He finds exemplars in Dickens, John Updike, Woody Allen:
Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot.