He would have to create out of life that is already subject to art, but no less confined to a book than a thought process guided by the book the waves of creation could be enormous for the critic, and no smaller in craft than the novelist. The tools, the building materials necessary, a welling of emotion and beauty and form applied, information available to the author, these are not recondite pieces of an illegible past, but a transparent collection available at any moment to the critic's eye, if he can recall minutia in such vastness for the aims of his own art; next his judgment.
He wonders how this art form hasn't been scrutinized as closely as others, how authors aren't held to such heights as the painters and sculptors, and in a nomenclature readily unavailable to the critic, he is to jump headlong into the author's two hundred year old art and suss out the chisel marks and indelible layers of painted scenes underneath the masterpiece as a babbler and a creator of systems, he must come to his own art as a way to examine the novelist's art.
The restrained critic often keeps literary events to the later parts of their lives, or they genuinely mix in the elements of critical work into their labyrinthine slice of life novels. This worries him in a synapse, and he moves on in his breathless pursuit to the true novel, which the critic has just come away from physically, and in a sense his breathlessness demands soon for him to pull away from mentally, constructs in his experience and full participation in it a work of art and not a slice of life, the work of the pages takes from him all of the focus required to make art. He cannot take pieces of the characters lives, or the situations, or the voice and apprehend them for analysis, and he cannot venture into the piece of art and muck it up with unmanifested eventualities. He must adhere to the way these are created, and he is pained that he cannot know where the novelist meets these characters, or what place provides their real domain, if they are real, or coloring of their attributes, and he jumps at the thought of meeting her or him in an alley, knowing fully the price they've paid in the end, but realizing then that they are portrayed and not actually continually living out their lives in the piece of art. A fool, he feels like a fool in this single moment, and continues to brood.
Conor Robin Madigan