Bloom on Mailer

This is from a piece by Elaine Woo, writing in The Los Angleses Times.

Mailer, according to Yale scholar and critic Harold Bloom, belongs in the pantheon of literature's giants. "He may be remembered more as prose prophet than as a novelist," Bloom wrote some years ago, "more as Carlyle than as Hemingway. There are worse literary fates. Carlyle, long neglected, doubtless will return. Mailer, now celebrated, doubtless will vanish into neglect, and yet always will return, as a historian of the moral consciousness of his era, and as the representative writer of his generation." By his own account, Mailer was, even at his lowest moments, "still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom!"