Tenth Post: I Finished the Article

This, too:

It wasn’t until after graduation, while he was selling clothing in a rock-music store in Los Angeles, that Bock really discovered fiction, and he began a crash course in contemporary writing, following a trail of blurbs. If someone on the jacket recommended a book Bock liked, then he would immediately read the recommender’s books. Rick Moody’s “Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven” made a huge impression, and so did David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” Those writers lead to William Vollmann and Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen and in turn to older writers like John Barth, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver and to some of Bock’s near-contemporaries: Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, A. M. Homes. “I discovered there was all this good stuff out there,” he said, “and as I began to try to write, it completely changed the way I thought about character and how I was going to address the city I grew up in.”

Ninth Post: “A little old for a first-time novelist”

I haven’t even finished the article yet, but yes!:

What distinguishes the book from most debut efforts is the grandness of its ambition. It’s a first novel that wants to read like the work of someone at the peak of his career, and it has an almost Dickensian amplitude — overamplitude, some critics may say — of subplot and detail; it’s one of those novels that strive to be much more than the sum of their parts, and in which the writing is not always averse to showing off a little.