[...] Has anyone described the way light changes during the morning better than Hardy does, in his poem 'The Going': 'while I / Saw morning harden upon the wall'? One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete.

his melodramatic, libretto-like plots

The zeugma of 'families and shipwrecks in the newspaper' is marvellous.

the usual manner in which contemporary criticism elides the question of authorial intention

if one takes postmodernism's proffered exit and happily turns the novels into fascinating melodramatic bricolage