Ursula Le Guin's confession

Jealousy sticks its nasty yellow-green snout mostly into my life as a writer. I'm jealous of other writers who soar to success on wings of praise, I'm contemptuously angry at them, at the people who praise them — if I don't like their writing.

Ursula Le Guin, No Time to Spare

That one writer should be jealous of another writer's success is no surprise. Aren't most people jealous of those who achieve what they themselves yearn to achieve — like, for example, the fellow actor who wins the Oscar, the teammate who hits the game-winning homer, the prettier girl who goes to the prom with the captain of the football team?

But two things do surprise me about what Ursula Le Guin writes in an essay called "About Anger," published in her book No Time to Spare. One is that she admits it. Most of us just put on a brave face and say something magnanimous in public, whatever our true feelings. Then we nurse our wounds in private or with those closest to us.

Le Guin tells us how she really feels. "I snarl at what I see as the unending overestimation of James Joyce," she writes. "The enshrinement of Philip Roth infuriates me." (I happen to agree with her on both of these points, though without the anger.)

The other things that surprises me is her final phrase: "... if I don't like their writing." Her jealousy, in other words, applies only to those writers she considers overrated and undeserving of their sales, their awards, their respect in the literary world. "I can read endless appreciations of Virginia Woolf," she says. "A good article about Jose Saramago makes my day."

Thus what she terms jealousy actually seems less like jealousy than critical discernment. Aren't we all a bit disgruntled when a trashy novel reaches the top of the best-seller list while a novel we love and consider much better doesn't even make the top 50? Don't we hate it when a movie that bored us wins an Oscar, while the makers of our favorite film must pretend it was an honor just to be nominated?

So Ursula Le Guin makes a confession here, but it seems to me that her sin may be something less than the jealousy she confesses.