In Hating "Great" Books I took Tom Bissell to task for not having read some books he "condemned." Bissell kindly read my comments, and posted his own. Below is my apology and correction.
Tom: You are absolutely correct -- your article did not condemn anyone. I apologize for mischaracterizing the main point I think you were trying to make (namely, not that these books are bad, but that you dislike reading them -- correct?). I got the list of writers you "condemn" from the letters responding to your piece. That was shoddy work, obviously. I had read your article days earlier, and didn't remember precisely which authors you singled out, other than Faulkner, of course. I really enjoyed your article, and I appreciate both your perspective and the fact that you're not afraid to express it to a "literary" audience that can, indeed, be "clerky" and immovable in its opinions about "literature." I'm near you in age, am also involved in the "literary" world, and have often felt a good deal of my own frustration (and shame) when books that are supposedly "great" don't seem so great to me. The title of my post ("Hating 'Great' Books") was actually intended to question the "greatness" of these books. Perhaps it wasn't part of your point, but I think the fact that the supposed brilliance of these texts is not available to a large number of readers suggests that they're not necessarily so "great" to begin with -- it's only that "clerky" literary establishment that deems them as such, so why should you, or anyone else, need to be ashamed if you disagree?
A more serious thought your article sparked in me was a comparison between what you call "a work of literature's temperament" to what Georg Lukacs has called a text's weltanschaung, or worldview. (See around page 19-20 of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism if you're interested in tracking the connection. Lukacs is often dismissed as a dogmatic old-school Marxist curmudgeon, but sometimes I wonder if critics who say that are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.) Of course, whereas your description of "the nearly cell-level sensation [a work of literature's] voice provokes in a reader" refers to an individual response to a text, Lukacs is talking about something I think he'd like to consider more universal, something available by anyone who reads a book. The real trouble is that no text says the same thing to everyone, which is really what your piece is saying. And that, I might add, is also what the letters responding to your piece (and my response here) also show: Readers simply cannot be trusted to "get" your intended meaning, no matter how hard you try to communicate clearly. Nevertheless, I apologize for misreading you in this case (although I assure you it was not "willful").
Anyway, thanks for reading this and I look forward to reading your future work.
9:12:46 AM 
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Faulkner, who had completed the bulk of his major work by the time of [Thomas] Wolfe's death in 1939, was only lightly regarded by the American public during that period. By 1945 only one his books, the notorious Sanctuary, remained in print, and he had alredy begun to slip into semiobscurity as a minor master of what was commonly called Southern Gothic. 
