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the formal term for the attempt to reconcile the suffering and meaninglessness of life with the notion of a providential, benign and powerful deity. Theodicy is a project at times ingenious, bleak, necessary, magnificent and platitudinous.

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language tha…

And in our own reading lives, every day, we come across that blue river of truth, curling somewhere; we encounter scenes and moments and perfectly placed words in fiction and poetry, in film and drama, which strike us with their truth, which move and sustain us, which shake habit's house to its fou…

The style could be called commercial realism. It lays down a grammar of intelligent, stable, transparent storytelling, itself derived from the more original grammar of Flaubert; and of course it didn't end with Greene. Efficient contemporary realistic narrative, elegantly finished, still sounds pre…