Switching On

In our October 22 issue, Lola Seaton reviews Jonathan Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat. “Buckley’s best fiction,” she writes, “is refreshingly free of self-regard: lovingly crafted but out of devotion to his characters rather than to exhibit his technical gifts.” This commitment to the lives of the people in his stories makes his books “alive right up to their edges,” and while that virtue “may be traditional, what the novel was built to do,” Seaton continues, “it can feel radical.”There is something about this ethic that a critic should inhabit, as well—a craft of devotion rather than exhibition. Seaton is a prolific young critic in the UK who pays as sharp and close attention to the shifting politics of the left as she does to contemporary novels. In venues ranging from Harper’s to the London Review of Books to the Financial Times, she has written about new fiction, Joni Mitchell, and soccer. For the Review, she has also reviewed Sheila Heti, Megan Nolan, and the 2022 London heat wave. She is a contributing writer at The New Statesman and an associate editor at New Left Review. This past week, I wrote to Seaton to ask her about close reading, switching off your critical voice (if...