When we read a novel, we can know everything except what the novelist chose not to tell us

"The uncritical repetition of half-truths by the press only reinforced my faith in the medium of fiction as the most honest investigative tool available to us," Askold Melnyczuk writes,

"because of all it does not claim for itself, as well as for the freedoms the genre grants. Fiction invites the writer to present an argument about causality. The only mysteries we're left with after finishing a novel are ones the writer has deliberately chosen not to resolve. Madame Bovary's suicide does not come as a shock; we know why Anna Karenina stepped in front of that train, no matter how much we hoped she would not."

— "Why My Favorite Characters to Write Are Often Unsympathetic and Unforgivable: Askold Melnyczuk on the Importance of Moral Complexity in Fiction," by Askold Melnyczuk, September 27, 2021.

What is a novel?

On this question, read: Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain.

"The novel, [Jennifer] Fleissner argues, has from its eighteenth-century origin been bound to reject any promise of self-dissolution, since it is intrinsically a mode that negotiates a difference between self (construed as will — that is, as autonomy and desire) and world (construed as field, antagonist, or object of desire)." — Grace Lavery, Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism