‘The men and women there are narratives, endlessly complex and intriguing. The most humdrum of them constitutes a narrative that would defeat Tolstoy at his best and most voluminous.’ The narrator’s point seems to be that human lives embody narratives which no fictional narrative could ever accurately transpose. Novels impose some kind of selection and sequence on the Babel of stories, spoken and unspoken, that are jangled and jumbled together in a modern city.
