Why I am Not a Novelist; or, Epigrams Revisited

So. This is why I am not a novelist: whenever I come up with an idea that I like, usually spend between seven and eight hundred words teasing it out into some form that, when you squint at it, kind of makes sense. And then, invariably, I read something by a novelist (or poet, or lyricist -- this one's pretty broad) in the ensuing days that says whatever I wanted to say 900 times more clearly. So, apropos of the benefits of textually constructed people (painting with a broad brush, Brionys) relative to personality constructed people (Cecelia, you, me, everyone we know), here is Proust, from Lydia Davis's translation of Swann's Way, on novelists:

"These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not 'real,' as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement...The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these [corporeal] parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate." (Proust, 86-87)

Fittingly, for Proust, that's way too long for a normal epigram. But, despite its strong claim ("equal quantity of immaterial parts"?), I think it distills the heart of what I was trying to talk about, about the end of Atonement. And since I just read it, it struck me, and now it's out here to strike you too. Happy Grendeling, and I hope to have something soon about the relationship to books had by either my mother's book club or my aunt Molly's solo adventures with the Diving Bell and the Butterfly within the week. Also, though Grendel's been announced, feel free to toss up any more comments on any part of Atonement.