Casual and Careless

A point in time, the moment of belief in one's tromping toward the narrative bogs, or entombing one's self in their story, comes and requires the critic's novelist to make choices in specific domains; ones found within the gradual decaying or strengthening light of the novel. The absolute autocrat requires adherence to the initial idea of their novel, and should the critic see adherence without trace of interruption or a delving into some character's choice issues with reasoning for their resolution in pertinence to the idea of the novel, he believes the novelist too sure of his text and in annoyance the burden becomes the idea of the text itself, one that comes too easily understood. This is often the mistake of the critic turned novelist's novel, that the idea is never abandoned for an art beyond the idea, the novel then becomes pure and manageable. The critic's novel comes with title, cast, and narrative before conception, and we read the text as a bound edifice with integrity and absolute calm in its maturity, but boredom. We gain nothing. Adhere to a central idea and the novel becomes simple marked pacing, a word-count, and a dust jacket--the characters dance for their author, their lives introspective and dramatic take place in an operatic world of dialog, the simple pleasure of mumbling and lost thoughts are gone, replaced by predictable soap opera pornography. The impression will not be a distinct set of characters with their own lives, but rather a portrait of an era, or place in which shaped beings do the waltz of the idea, be it emotional display or remembrance, and yes, the populace will love it because it often reflects their ineloquent lives, but in time the work will become a token of serial commodity, an eternal insider, a bestseller. He removes certain classics from this domain as they were most certainly the origin, due their centrifugal force as their dominance and craft leaves all followers as groping idiots. The critic, disgusted with the re-birth of this type of critic's novel of imitation, wondered how the text in his lap could have avoided the autocrat's rushing hand.

The impression of life, an imparted gesture, doesn't make for a good story or for bestseller reflective order, but leaves the reader off-set from their lives and peering into characters lost in their before and after--the most significant point of existence.