I think the best novelists are perhaps necessarily not the smartest ones. It’s the ones who find pleasure in representing what’s a challenge to make beautiful. I don’t believe Tolstoy was a genius, as in all-around smart guy. I feel he recognized he had a genius FOR a certain kind of expression and this helped him tackle some of the preoccupations (with theories of history etc) that he was less genius at. Novelists for example like Iris Murdoch, William T. Vollman, maybe Richard Powers, strike me as so innately and broadly intelligent that their work is arid in some basic way: it wants to be a philosophical treatise, an encyclopedic history etc, instead of a story told with some representational acumen as a way for the author to see and make communion with an imagined readership, which is what those with this limited gift accomplish, writing books that live.
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