He offers surely the best available example of novelistic ambition squared with the highest aesthetic standards.
Here are two examples of his novelistic vivacity, one from "Cloud Atlas" and one from his new novel, "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet" (Random House; $26).
"Survival," which had been turned down by Life, is often cited as an early example of new journalism, combining novelistic storytelling with extensive reportage.
Maybe with the exception of "The Wire," which has that overarching, novelistic feeling to it, there are few examples of that kind of truly long-form, consistent storytelling out there, especially in this genre, which seems so tailor-made for it.
Hersey's profile of Kennedy was the first piece he published in The New Yorker (after it was rejected by Life magazine), and it's often cited as an early example of new journalism, which paired novelistic storytelling with traditional gumshoe reporting.
Wollstonecraft wrote excoriating reviews, criticizing the passive novelistic heroines of the time and praising, for example, the "wise and resilient" Mrs Stafford of Charlotte Smith's autobiographical novel Emmeline (1788).
She never could focus on what she called "the important fact" (the score of the game, for example), losing its "fringe" in peripheral matter (her novelistic sense of the players' "insouciance" and "sangfroid").
Stencil's entire existence is focused on the hunt for V., a classic novelistic quest-without-resolution (in fact, V. might be fiction's greatest example of a MacGuffin).
Part of the achievement of its "shaped chaos" is that Lucinde presents, within the form of a novelistic work itself, a romantic 'contest' of competing novelistic possibilities (see, for example, the interpretation of the famous chapter on the "Allegory of Impudence" in Behler 1993).
His reasons are novelistic.
