The fiction writer who is also a critic is cursed with the predicament of having strewn about the very tools for his own dismemberment. Hold up the analytic knives to a purely creative output, and the fruits of artistic labor too readily slacken and yield. Susan Sontag has often been castigated for writing novels that fail to meet her own exacting critical standards, but author-critics such as Edmund White, Lionel Trilling, Iris Murdoch, A. S. Byatt, and, more recently, James Wood have also been the subject of this particular jibe. How then, to court success when the stakes of one’s own making