[José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.

"
After Beckett's death in 1989 Bloom has pointed towards other authors as the new main figures of the Western literary canon. "I saw the Oxford English Dictionary there for the first time" he said many years later. I purchased and read Fearful Symmetry a week or two after it had come out and reached the bookstore in Ithaca New York.

These theories dominated his writing for a decade after which he began to focus on what he named "religious criticism" in books such as The Book of J (1990) and The American Religion (1992). He has edited hundreds of anthologies for the Chelsea House publishing firm.