Boldness is something we expect of novelists, and Keneally has usually demonstrated his by taking on large, complex subjects from the past, the great white whales of history, like the American Civil War (in "Confederates"); the origins of his unruly homeland, Australia (in "The Playmaker"); and the Holocaust (in "Schindler's List," which seems destined to remain his most famous book).
As this example suggests, their habitual frame of reference is, as they once put it, "in abrasive countertendency" to what's expected of serious Italian novelists.
McCloud's drawing, for example, is merely serviceable – which is all that seems to be expected of a graphic novelist.
As might be expected of such a subtle novelist and playwright, Frayn is particularly acute on the nature of poetic truth, and what such truth has to tell us about Truth.
She was huge, with the icy blue gaze you'd expect of a novelist who spends her days dreaming up grisly murders.
Up until the 1980s, it was expected that novelists would be people of some age and experience.
Most of us expect writers, especially novelists of a certain stature, to be, ascetic, lofty creatures, occupied with the intricacies of the human condition – which explains our surprise when they turn out to be hardnosed publicists seeking to maximise book sales by promoting their product as aggressively as one would push a new shampoo.
Middlemarch was published serially, and its early readers expected the novelist to contrive the eventual marriage of hero and heroine.
Asked about the venture, Jay Mclnerney said he was amused by it but he did not expect novelists to disappear.... Spalding Gray hasn't fully entered into the spirit of the thing.
