Open Thread: Emotional vs. Intellectual Novelists?

George Eliot vs. Charles Dickens? Victor Hugo vs. Alessandro Manzoni? Henry James vs. Dostoevsky?

I dislike Monet but love Cézanne. Why? I couldn’t say. But it’s true: Show me a Monet and I shrug; show me a Cézanne and I sing.

Curious about my subterranean rationale, I asked ChatGPT. Here’s what it told me, more or less: Where Monet concerns himself with surfaces, Cézanne obsesses over architecture. Monet dissolves, while Cézanne builds. Monet is lig…