Jonathan Lethem and Ian McEwan

This passage from Lethem's review of McEwan's new novel gets it exactly right on what it's like to read a great novel (obviously I'm in the "delicious agony" camp) (Atonement is one of the novels I experienced like this, another is Salman Rushdie's Shame, also Julia Glass's first novel, and, though not every sentence, The Portrait of a Lady) (I think I need to read some Jonathan Lethem) (and catch up on the Ian McEwan novels I've missed):

Among the encompassing definitions we could give “the novel” (“a mirror walking down a road,” “a narrative of a certain size with something wrong with it”) is this: a novel is a vast heap of sentences, like stones, arranged on a beach of time. The reader may parse the stones of a novel singly or crunch them in bunches underfoot in his eagerness to cross. These choices generate tension: in my eagerness to learn “what happens,” might I miss something occurring at the level of the sentence? Some experience this as a delicious agony, others distrust it. Our appetite for Ian McEwan's form of mastery is a measure of our pleasure in fiction’s parallax impact on our reading brains: his narratives hurry us feverishly forward, desperate for the revelation of (imaginary) secrets, and yet his sentences stop us cold to savor the air of another human being’s (imaginary) consciousness.