“But this will be unceasingly difficult: for the writer has to act as if the available novelistic methods are continuously about to turn into mere convention and so has to try to outwit that inevitable aging. Chekhov's challenge--'Ibsen just doesn't know life. In life it simply isn't like that'--is as radical now as it was a century ago, because forms must continually be broken. The true writer that free servant of life, is one who must always be acting as if life were a category beyond anything the novel had yet grasped; as if life itself were always on the verge of becoming conventional.”