Former vice president Dan Quayle has even announced that marital fidelity will be “the issue” in the next presidential race. Sure—the heck with foreign policy, education, the economy, public works . . . “Trust the song, not the singer” is age-old wisdom. I’m glad that the singers and musicians, male and female, whose work I have loved over the years did not have to display certificates of marital fidelity in order to qualify as performers. Likewise the fiction writers. No one asked them to be moral exemplars in their personal lives. It was their work that was important. Lately the agenda of aesthetic discussion, along with politics, seems to have been lifted from an afternoon talk show. One example from recent memory: Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel American Pastoral, which I read and admired. At least three quarters of the people to whom I mentioned the book didn’t really care what was between the covers of American Pastoral, but wanted to know if I had read Claire Bloom’s memoir of her apparently troubled marriage to Roth.
