Of Proust and Seuss

Perhaps it is merely a matter of mood—mine is unaccountably cheery of late—but I do not believe that things literary are as dreary as Cynthia Ozick [“Literary Entrails,” Criticism, April] might have us understand. Ozick is certain, for example, that literary criticism is not happening. By this she means that one will not find, in the cultural air, the quantity and quality of conversation that she claims prevailed half a century earlier when her avatars—Trilling, Kazin, Howe, Wilson—were all reviewing regularly.

Born a half-century after Ozick, I have a different sense of what one might reasonably…