Mr. Andrews taps on his wineglass, stands and makes this inscrutable toast: "It is a tribute to Ferran that even a novelist capable of fabricating the most improbable plots and completely unfettered by practical concerns can't be as imaginative in the kitchen as Ferran can".
Books like the Bible, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf may underlie permanent or transient cultures, but it is hard to find, except in the early Romantic period, a novelist capable of arousing new attitudes to life (as opposed to aspects of the social order) and forging the vocabulary of such attitudes.
"She appears precision-made, machine-made, so different from Diana, whose human awkwardness and emotional incontinence showed in her every gesture," the novelist continued, "capable of going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation".
Stevens is building a reputation in Europe as a man of rare talent who, like the Great American Novelists before him, is capable of anatomising that bizarre-seeming country so that it makes sense to us.
To her credit, Ducornet understands, as novelists must, that people are capable not only of wanting, with equal ardor, more than one thing at the same time, but of wanting things that directly contradict each other.
"Florida is always capable of surprising people," said Carl Hiaasen, the famed Florida novelist and columnist.
His credo as a novelist is that humankind is open-ended: People are capable of surprising not only others but themselves.
"She was a novelist who continually excavated her own life for her material, capable of maintaining a wry and writerly distance on emotional and historical upheavals as they were happening – as these letters evidence".
"No one in New York or Davos or Pôrto Alegre or anywhere else for that matter is really capable of anything more than a diagnosis of the contemporary situation," the Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar said in an interview.
Some children's novelists limit themselves to what they think their readers are capable of; Handler creates his own fantastical world and invites us to find our own way through it.
