[Saroyan's] contribution has been to write from joy, which is in short supply lately, and sparse as a tradition in our literature anyway, unless one looks back to some of the founding figures, such as Walt Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. He predates the glut of black humor and rancorous ethnicity, the literary theater of cruelty and the absurd, though part of the point about Saroyan which is so interesting is that he has been a profoundly, innovatively "ethnic" writer—one of the very first in America, one who has been a conscious spokesman for a people who survived a genocidal holocaust—but that throughout his life he has chosen to write not of despair and dadaism and devastation, but joy….

The Saroyan working method—and it can seem repetitive—is to swing way out from the trapeze, do a somersault or two, and reach out flatly for our hands, trusting partly in us, and secure in the faith that if he misses there is a God somewhere to break his fall. He is an all-around believer; and of course there are, for example, the two ways to lay one's hand against one's face: either feeling the cheek, or feeling the skull—death—underneath the cheek. One can look at one's hand and see a mechanized, strange set of bending pincers, terrifying to contemplate, or see the hand as an elixir of the spirit. Because we can admire artists who lean toward either view, it's not a matter of shutting anybody out: only of insisting that both be heard.