The kind of writer better-known writers talk about

 Christian Lorentzen, reviewing Padgett Powell’s new book “Indigo” for The New York Times, posed this question: “Is Powell, like another of his heroes, Peter Taylor, a genuine “Biggee’ of U.S. lit but ‘the kind of writer one discovers by overhearing better-known writers talk about writers”?

It had been a while since I’d thought of Peter Taylor, who, like my father and his father before him, was from Trenton, Tenn.

Trenton had a population of about 4,000 when I was growing up. You’d think I could claim some kinship to a “genuine ‘Biggee’” of American literature. But the town had two distinct families of Taylors. I come from the non-literary line.

If you want to get to why some writers talk about Peter Taylor, take a look at his story “Dean of Men.”

The narrator, a dean, talks to his son, Jack, questioning the length of his hair and whether a long-haired man can play “the male role” in a marriage. Peter Taylor doesn’t tell you the story is set on a college campus in the 1960s. He just shows you the ’60s.

The narrator, aside from casually demeaning his son, is mainly offering Jack a long explanation for the divorce from Jack’s mother. It all began with a quarrel with an academic committee about faculty housing.

The narrator, as father’s do, tells his son that you have to go on living — you have to make sacrifices to live fully.

But if you read the story as I did, you’re appalled by what the narrator sacrificed for a career. It’s easy to roll your eyes at primitive societies that still make use of the sacrificial knife. But we sophisticated folks make sacrifices every day. And, like Father Abraham, we sometimes find our children on the altar.