'Rarer than Trumpeter Swans'

In 1971 I was still consuming contemporary fiction at a vigorous clip while trying to catch up with the literature of the past. My timing was good. Some of the masters were still around and still writing, often near their peak – Nabokov, Bellow and Thomas Berger, in particular. We didn’t know it then but the postwar boom in American literature was slowly losing steam. Malamud, Welty and Ellison had already done their best work and Roth was writing some of his worst. Still, I thought I was keeping up with things and generally knew the field.

On Sunday, while looking for something else, I came across a review written by L.E. Sissman for the New York Times and published on Halloween 1971 (five days after my nineteenth birthday). The book in question was the novel What Happens Next? by Gilbert Rogin. I can say with certainty I don’t remember having ever seen Rogin’s name before. He’s a blank in my experience. And yet, Sissman opens his review audaciously:

“I think Gilbert Rogin has written a great novel, the first new one I’ve run across in quite some time. Which is as it should be; great novels, almost by definition, should be rarer than trumpeter swans.”

I admire Sissman enormously as a poet and reviewer/essayist, but I’m skeptical. I’ve put Rogin’s novel on hold at the library. My expectations are almost nonexistent. We’ve all oversold books on occasion. Time smooths things out. Rogin died two years ago without me ever knowing who he was. I don’t know how this happened. Sometimes we have no idea just how ignorant we are.