If I were to say that the novel is an utterly heterosexual form of art — simultaneously an instrument and an expression of the relations between men and women — I would be entering realms so socially awkward and aesthetically complex that it hardly seems worth the effort. An openly homosexual critic might be able to get away with the claim, much as an old-fashioned Marxist could brand novelwriting a middle-class enterprise without being thought to despise the working class. But the rest of us have no such luxury. Since homosexuals obviously have written about their experience, any effort to locate the form’s origin in heterosexuality must only seem an effort to strip homosexuals of the power to write fiction.