Serious writing actually tries to get somewhere – to make intellectual, emotional, psychic, and philosophical ‘progress.’ (This progress could, of course, also be regress.) Obviously, with some very accomplished novelists one feels this via magisterial storytelling (actually, I can think of very few at the moment), but in the work of my favorite writers, the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.