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O: There's a line of Saul Bellow's—“I write to discover the next room of my fate.” In this way, I think, many novels are self-portraits—or future self-portraits, self-explorations, even if the story is set in an alien situation. You can try on this costume, that costume.

M: Somebody once asked W…

There were many people in France writing realistic novels in the nineteenth century—Balzac comes to mind—but Flaubert was the most conscious of what he was doing, and agonized about it the most. Closely observed reality, for its own sake, had not really been a part of the tradition of literature in…