In this week’s New Yorker Hermione Lee talks with Philip Roth about his new novel “Exit Ghost” – the interview is slightly hermetic. Mr. Roth says: “The book is full of allusions to writers because all the major characters in the book are either writers, aspiring writers, translators, or serious readers, and such people talk a lot about books – at least that’s my experience with the writers I know.” And also: “To begin with, Zuckerman is a novelist, and it is the way of the novelist to take the raw material of life and transform it into something that is no longer life but language, language in the service of a surmise.”

The Dutch essayist Karel van het Reve once criticized Mr. Bellow’s novels by saying that the characters in these novels talked as if they were reading the New York Review of Books all day long.
Nothing wrong with reading the New York Review of Books all day long, but the question remains if the novelist transforms raw life into something that is no longer life.
Means transforming raw material into language killing the material?