Good fiction is rarely the bailiwick of grammarians. They often produce clear, competent writing, but the yardstick is different for fiction. I’d venture to say the last pages of Gatsby are immortal, elegant beyond description, yet their essence was produced by a notoriously poor speller and cleaned up by an outstanding editor.

Good fiction leaves Gardner’s fictive dream undisturbed, to be delivered by clean, crisp prose that is often lyrical and so compelling, so evocative, that the reader is transported and set down in another time and place. Good fiction is subject to craft, and the honing of that craft. It can be polished to a high shine, an elegant glaze, and then set prominently on the mantle.

Great fiction explodes. A sentence, a paragraph, perhaps a hundred pages, will set you back in your chair, halt your breath. Great fiction is unwilling to be deconstructed, even by determined writers, let alone by the casual reader. The individual words may be recognizable, the structure familiar, but there remains transcendence in the writing that is ultimately ineffable, a gift randomly parceled, leaving us only to grant a simple nod to the anointed.