Fictional virtue …

… Bryan Appleyard — Blog Archive — Pat Barker: We Write in Blood. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“Sometimes,” she says, “as a novelist you have to surprise yourself.” She is emphatically not a modernist or postmodernist author. She writes as simply and directly as she can, avoiding anything resembling experimentation. “I don’t experiment because I think I have something to say, and I want to write it in a way that can be understood. Experimental novels often feed the writer’s ego and lose the reader.”