Henry James’s famous injunction to aspiring writers to be “one of those on whom nothing is lost!”—embodied in James’s own lifelong practice of note-taking—is shown here to be at one and the same time a handmaid to literary realism and to a vertiginously “postmodern” reflexivity: encouraged to “write what you know,” the novelist eventually is driven to represent his intimate knowledge of the writing process and its consequences, to address the fact of fiction making.
