The power of essay-writing novelists

The historian and philosopher Jonathan Rée investigates the literary force of essay-writing novelists. "Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demanding - there is no essayistic equivalent of the 'popular novel' - and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus.... And as four recently published books [by Kundera, Coetzee, Sontag and Vargas Llosa] ... demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with."

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