Today's subject is literary greatness. Why is it so hard to pinpoint what makes a great work such? One of the (many) reasons that Hemingway is great is because he is a master wordsmith: there are no extraneous words. Similarly, Cormac McCarthy and Ray Carver. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, Henry James, another acknowledged Great Writer: by the time you read to the end of a Jamesian sentence, you've (or at least, I've) forgotten what the beginning said.
And what about characters? O'Hara and Fitzgerald, who pin characters down to the last detail. Versus those like Eco, whose work is more symbolic. Yet Great Writers all.
Is there no rule? How can we separate the bad from the good from the great without some sort of guideline? Or am I being too much the lawyer again?
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