…Saroyan does not impose himself on the world, on this great Rome. He does not even offer himself to it. In these times of bottomless appetites, his platter of unsullied conscience is too insubstantial to be imposed or offered. You cannot impose or offer something for which there is not even the faintest demand. This barren soil has no need of his pomegranate trees, and Saroyan, an orphan deprived of every kind of state and national patronage, murmurs in slight bewilderment: you are good; what you are doing, you were bound to do; what will be, will be; but there is also this.
What is there? Human compassion. Where is that compassion? Where has it become an official religion and created its own social order? Saroyan has no answer, and he creates situations and people whose shared name is grass, a cow waiting in the dusk to be milked or slaughtered, a horse standing in a valley a little way from the highway, or John. They are so good that they themselves do not know the measure of their goodness, for they know none of reality’s other dimensions. The name they all share is William Saroyan…