A. S. Byatt--one of my favorite novelists--did an online chat with The Washington Post earlier today. Here are some choice excerpts.

On writing moral or issue-oriented fiction:

Most writers are better at treating big moral issues obliquely, unless they are completely possessed by something they must say. I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Jounralists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things you do journalism. Books I have read that were written at a moment of social-political crisis tend to be incomprehensible 20 years later. Books that are written about some problem of 20 or 50 or 100 years ago are written with understanding and somehow also illuminate the present and the future.

I like the kind of independence of this brief period of my life when you don't feel physically "really" old, and I know that my work is better than it ever has been. So I feel kind of gleeful. But I also know it won't last very long. So I think I should look at aging while I'm still physically fit enough to look at it objectively. So far it's been fun, but any moment now it will cease to be fun.

I spend a lot of my time watching tennis. Tennis players are old when they're Agassi's age. Whereas writers, particularly writers who write long novels, they are only starting at Agassi's age. I knew that as a little girl. I knew I had chosen a profession for old people. I hated being a novelist when I was 20--I had nothing to write about. So my life now is a kind of small window of having the knowledge and not dying.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words. And I love the difference in time between looking at a painting and reading a book. Looking at a painting is a timeless contemplation. There is no reason why you should stop looking. And this can become difficult. A book must be read from beginning to end, however you divide your attention after that.

The quartet is easy to describe. Virgin and the Garden was red white and green, and the red was blood and the white was stone and the green was grass. Still Life started out very dark purple, and then I felt there ought to be yellow, it was the complementary color to the purple, and because I felt there ought to be yellow, I thought of van Gogh's chair, and in fact van Gogh became an important symbolic figure in that book. He got in because of the color yellow. Babel Tower is black and red, because of blood and destruction. And A Whistling Woman is quite difficult, because it tries to tie them all together. And in fact it combines the colors of all the others. At the end there are two scenes of fire, one is a real fire when the students burn down the university, and the second is a metaphorical fire when Frederica is looking over the moors and it's all the gorse is in bloom, and it looks as far as you can see the land is on fire, but it's only flowers. And the colors of The Whistling Woman are the Babel Tower colors, which are the real fire, and the Still Life yellow, which is the harmless fire.

certainly the English novel went through a long period of just describing personal feelings or being symbolic. But I think recently there has been a huge surge of interest in non-realistic storytelling, such as fairy tale or adventures. I admire the work of two young British writers, Lawrence Norfolk and David Mitchell, both of whom are flamboyant master storytellers. It is also true that Freudian psychoanalysis is a form of storytelling. People tell the story of their own lives, including the dreams, in order to understand them. But I am increasingly interested in stories that move beyond one person's experience. I think we had lost those and are getting them back. In England, there is an increasing art of storytelling for children out loud, both old traditional stories and new ones.

Before I wrote Possession, I was often criticized for being erudite or complicated, and I used to say, I write for myself or for Henry James. I had a very clear idea of the ghost of Henry James as moral support. However, when Possession became a bestseller, I got so many letters from so many kinds of readers that I decided there are readers who can be interested in almost anything--including erudition--as long as you also tell a story. I enjoy meeting readers because writing is very lonely--and I enjoy being alone--but I am constantly amazed to meet people who have read and liked my books.

American editors speak of some imaginary person, The American Reader, who will not understand things. I have formed the view that they are speaking of somebody who would never buy books anyway. America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.

In making the decision to leave academe for fiction, and in inhabiting fictionwriting as intelligently (at times ponderously intelligently) as she has, Byatt has more in common with the also occasionally ponderous but also often marvelous Victorian novelist George Eliot--who at her lover's advice chose fictionwriting over philosophy in order to ensure that her explorations of ideas never became bloodless and sterile--than with most contemporary authors and critics. She is very much a writer of the modern moment, and yet she is also an artist animated by the ideals of another time. If you have never read any Byatt, do: you can warm up with The Matisse Stories, or plunge straight into Possession. If you do read Byatt, you'll be glad to know she's just brought out a new book, Little Black Book of Stories.

The thing I find puzzling about Byatt's reputation is why she isn't considered with the 'big boy' novelists like Philip Roth and John Updike.

Perhaps it's because many (all?) of her major novels involve with some version of present-day academic romance? The contemporary plots help explain the relevance of the historical plots involving Queen Elizabeth, impressionist painters, pre-Raphaelites, and so on. They help draw us in. But they also make the novels a little more comfortable (and less high-brow, despite the impressive erudition).

I also especially like how she works with intellectual history and emergence of modern scientific method. This is something I haven't seen mentioned much in reviews...

Totally agreed about how Byatt deals with intellectual history and the historical dimensions of the scientific method. That's why I tend to group her with George Eliot, who was steeped in both. Byatt, not surprisingly, writes wonderfully about Eliot (she has edited editions of Middlemarch, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and a volume of Eliot's essays).

I'm often puzzled by the positive reception that Byatt's work gets among academics. After all, _Posession_ is about an academic who learns to stop studying the (ultimately unknowable) biographical minutiae of dead poets and starts living--first and foremost, by writing his *own* poetry.

It's a worthy lesson for a great many English profs, but it's surprising how many of them get a huge kick out of the academic satire of the novel but apparently miss its clearest--and for professional scholars, perhaps most disturbing--conclusions.