“…realistic verisimilitude (of the O’Hara sort) has become burdensome and difficult, and that it requires a degree of special knowledge which only a small number of fanatical devotees can attain. In an era of specialization such as ours, even a botanist, studying plant hormones, let us say, will not know what a colleague in plant ecology is doing. Literally to know what he is writing about would impose an impossible strain on the most dedicated realist. The most informational of novelists can no longer adequately inform us. The world is really too much for the realist to cope with.”
