Tom La Farge writes:
Here’s what I’d say about critical fictions: that all writers are readers, that most
writers are magpies, reading for the shiny threads they snatch up and carry off
to their hoards, to be used in something they write sooner or later. You can’t call
this “critical” on their part, even though to a reader it will suggest an inflection
to the reading, if only because the borrowed thread, once perceived, emerges
even more shiny from the weave. In the critical fiction the entire fabric is woven
of stolen bits, selected and rewoven in a somewhat different pattern that both
makes a new and interesting object (the “fiction”) and comments holistically on
the original (the “critique”).