The novel — form and possibility

The novel is the form most fitted to the interior life — to time as it is actually experienced, to the gap between surface and depth, to the way a person's inner weather shapes everything they see and touch without their being able to explain it. Its length is not a constraint but a permission: the permission to go slowly, to accumulate, to let the reader inhabit a consciousness across many hours until that inhabitation becomes a form of knowledge. No other form holds so much, or forgives so much, or demands so much of both maker and reader.