It's an interesting and unintended facet of being a writer that the process may well make you an outsider. Odd job to pay rent, odd hours, etc. What's interesting is the way that this unintended life style, call it what you will, offers the writer an interesting perspective. It's as if there is a law of nature that says that no great commentary on life and society can be born from the middle of it.

Let's take Updike. Great writer, no doubt about it, a fine draftsman. He is cleverly positioned within the norm. Sure, he goes through some stuff worth writing about, very much so. He goes through angst and deep stuff. But while certainly not Victorian, he strikes one sometimes as a mannerist. He's not an earth-shaker, a great challenge to the way people may generally see things. He writes from within society, and his stories don't venture from basic forms of social norm. Know what I mean? Am I crazy for saying so? Well, he can create a wild safari out of that seemingly benign trip to the grocery store, so well that whatever I am thinking here at the moment doesn't stick so perfectly. I merely offer a thought to entertain, and I needed, like all arguments do, an example.

Let's take Melville, or Kerouac, or Hemingway. Here you have more of an outsider, a traveller, someone gone somewhere different. The road took them there. And they end up writing something that offers a perspective you don't get elsewhere. They say very interesting things. They create the world a little bit differently. They offer a critique about some basic daily assumptions, and they end up making art.

Where does that art lead them? It seems it can lead such a writer further out, further outside, in a very different place, in a place that's hard to judge or figure because it is so unique, so different. Are they still human? Do they still belong? Can they fit in ever again with the kinds of relationships that people normally have? Are they tainted by their portrayal of things people consider to be avoided? Are they to be like Icarus, flying too high away and toward the sun to places where they don't belong?

As often the case, Kundera to the rescue with a new book of essays, reviewed last Sunday in the New York Times Book Review, a defense of art.

And also a timely New Yorker article from the August 30 issue by Ian Frazier, "On the Prison Highway, the Gulag's silent remains." Here we have the issue a little more clear cut, starkly so. The photo caption: ''The labor camps took citizens the Soviet Union did not need and converted their lives into gold and timber, for trade abroad." The writer, like Solzhenitsyn, outsider to 'society,' is the useless person. And unless he's making elevator music to keep the working masses shuffling forward through their productive days, well, his opinion, his take on matters, is not needed, and in fact counterproductive.

Maybe the unwillingness to conform neatly comes out of a writer's habit of keeping writing, an unintended consequence given that he wished indeed to belong very much from the start and all along, to be a pillar of society, just that things went a little differently than he might have expected. And maybe it becomes a bit of a hard thing to face, the fact that he will not find it easy to change his ways, that a die has been cast. Like the submarine captain in Das Boot, he knows the score. He would want to change a few things, he would like to belong, like the normal person seems to be able to do, but ever finds it increasingly difficult to do so.

A Hemingway, a Kerouac, a Melville can be dead-wrong both in the way they live, and in what they write. Yet, by some weird natural possibility, somehow they, through a back door, have an odd way of finding something right to say, like Ishmael observing Queequeg.