A short while ago you lionized John Updike (“An American Subversive,” January 31, 2009). In your review of Blake Bailey’s biography, Cheever: A Life (New York: Knopf: 2009), you now lionize John Cheever, another American writer of doubtful worth, who died in 1982 (“Buttoned Up,” March 14, 2009). Throughout, you glorify the novel, supposedly the king of literary forms. Cheever, whose calling was the short story of the New Yorker ilk, “knew he needed to write a novel to be taken seriously,” for the short story was a form with “the life expectancy of a mayfly,” as he himself conceded. This is an entrenched Anglo-Saxon bias, to be sure. Asked why he bothered to write, you quote Cheever as replying: “I write to make sense of my life.” Indeed, this is what writing is all about. And the shortest of stories comes much closer to the right literary form for such an endeavor than the novel. In fact, the journal is the literary form of choice in many other cultural environments. Novels are for spoilt readers and indulging writers without a life of their own.