Complexity, subtlety, and breadth are the virtues here. If a writer is going to engage in the intellectual business of assigning meanings and showing relationships, he had better think very well. The novel of ideas had better be good. We are not interested in simple allegory, nor in a world so biased as to be unrecognizable, nor in any excited shoutings about. For most of us, the “whole truth” is necessarily complex; to simplify is to fudge. Nobody wants to read a well-ground axe.