![]() ![]() For her, the attempt to capture “real life” in words inadvertently crowded it out, like the towering stacks of newspaper in a hoarder’s home: “How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window all the tiresome old patterns, and leave the room as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as that house into which the glory of Pentecost descended.” Boring novels are overcrowded with cleverly worded approximations of what it feels like to live, but great ones have the good sense to leave the best bits off the page. ![]() IN 1908, HENRY JAMES pronounced that “the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million,” consisting of “apertures, of dissimilar shape and size.” About 15 years later, Willa Cather took up the metaphor again but replaced those airy, asymmetrical windows with the tchotchkes of realist description. ![]()
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