He felt as sad as an uninhabited house

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

These days, I find, literary novelists are much more interested in plot and much less interested in plausibility, or in realism, than literary critics are.

(And to say that such books “transcend” the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.)

Most of the critical vocabulary we have for talking about books is geared to dealing with dense, difficult texts like the ones the modernists wrote. It’s designed for close-reading, for translating thick, worked prose into critical insights, sentence by sentence and quote by quote, not for the long view that plot requires. But plot is an extraordinarily powerful tool for creating emotion in readers. It can be used crudely, but it’s also capable of fine nuance and even intellectual power, even in the absence of serious, Fordian prose. The emotions and ideas plot evokes can be huge and dramatic but also complex and subtle and intimate. The things that writers like Raymond Chandler or Philip Pullman or Joe Abercrombie do with plot are utterly exquisite.

—

“You’re being watched too, remember?”
“I wasn’t aware—”
“That some of the screens you’re looking at are looking at you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, they are.”

—

The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.

Outside the stars were paled by the glaring lights of the city, and the large apartment was stale with his mother’s sorrow.

HEATHER CHANDLER, Veronica in tow, hits the Country Club Kids with a salvo of false pleasantness, capped by a scowling smile.

Alone at a table in the Siberia of the cafeteria, MARTHA
finishes a forkful of chicken.

A coolly coed cabal of Country Club Kids icily eye the approaching VERONICA and HEATHER CHANDLER.

I like less naturalistic writing. Now the criticism you get is, ‘People don’t talk like that.’ My feeling is, ‘Hey man, I’m making a movie. Do people talk like they do in Casablanca? No.’ I like the older movies where you were allowed to have almost show-offy dialogue. You didn’t have to have everything be played real. I like something beyond real.

I leave it till the last minute. And then I leave it some more. Eventually, I leave it till I’m desperate. … I always think, I’m not ready to write it, I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s just a jumble of thoughts in a state of flux, there’s no story, I don’t know how A connects to B, I don’t know anything! I get myself into a genuine state of panic. … Normally, I’ll leave it till the deadline, and I haven’t even started writing. This has become, over the years, a week beyond the deadline, or even more. It can be a week—or weeks—past the delivery date, and I haven’t started writing. In fact, I don’t have delivery dates any more. I go by the start-of-preproduction date. I consider that to be my real deadline. And then I miss that. It’s a cycle that I cannot break. I simply can’t help it. It makes my life miserable.

Why did dogs make one want to cry? There was something so quiet and hopeless about their sympathy.

I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.

…he blew out his match and his flash of confidence at the same time.

Poor whims of fancy, tender and unharsh. They are the enemy to bitterness and regret, and sweeten this exile we have brought upon ourselves.