Alexia: Our ignorance about the lives of so many novelists is unfortunate  How much deeper and more complete our appreciation of their works would be if we knew more about the personal wellsprings of their thought and art  Malik: I disagree
Because we know virtually nothing of their personal lives, we can resist the temptation to reduce consideration of their works to biography and psychoanalysis, and instead engage each work on its own artistic terms
knowledge about a novelist's personal life can interfere with the appropriate understanding of that novelist's work