[...] For details represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, cancelled, evaded. I think of details as nothing less than bits of life sticking out of the frieze of form, imploring us to touch them. Details are not, of course, just bits of life: they represent that magical fusion, wherein the maximum amount of literary artifice (the writer's genius for selection and imaginative creation) produces a simulacrum of the maximum amount of non-literary or actual life, a process whereby artifice is then indeed converted into (fictional, which is to say, new) life. Details are not lifelike but irreducible: things-in-themselves, what I would call lifeness itself. [...]