“Mr. Moore likes long, difficult novels that ask to be read, he thinks, as stylish performances: He approaches them in the same spirit as that of watching a ballet or a figure-skating competition. "The reason some of us consider [Joyce's] Ulysses the greatest novel ever written is not because it has a gripping story, lovable characters, or unique insights into the human situation, but because it is the most elaborate rhetorical performance ever mounted, making wider and more masterful use of all the forms and techniques of prose than any other novel." The novel, Mr. Moore says (following a well-known remark by Vladimir Nabokov), is "essentially a delivery system for aesthetic bliss." He reports that "reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream." Little wonder: For him, "the novel is primarily about the workings of art; it doesn't represent 'the experience of the soul in search of God,' as one commentator enthused, so much as the experience of the poet in search of metaphors."”
