Reading this it occurs to me that the ‘poetic-prose style’, or rather the attempt to fatten prose by means of devices stolen from poetry, was one of the worst things to have happened to literature in the last ten thousand or so years. If prose is poetic it must be so on its own terms (because what is poetry but the terrorism of self-reference?). The cold, brutally undergirded sentences of Proust, or Flaubert’s, which, as Sartre says somewhere, unfurl and kill their subjects with reptilic precision, this is what prose can do. Prose must admit to being poetry’s executioner; their union - the futility of which this extract adroitly demonstrates - is nothing but bad faith.