Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary McCarthy

Suspense, McCarthy implies, is less a trick played on the audience than a live wire running through the writer’s own hands. The line punctures the romantic myth of the all-seeing novelist calmly moving chess pieces across a board. Instead, she recasts authorship as a kind of cultivated ignorance: you build a situation, you press characters into motion, and then you watch with the same hungry uncertainty you’re trying to provoke in someone else.

That inversion matters because it reframes “plot” as discovery rather than control. If the novelist is “intensely curious,” the hero isn’t a puppet but a problem: a bundle of desires and contradictions that can surprise even their maker. McCarthy’s word choice is slyly democratic. Suspense is “not only” in the reader, meaning the reader’s experience is real, but it’s not sovereign. The writer is implicated, emotionally and intellectually, in the outcome.

The subtext carries a quiet rebuke to formula. A novel engineered purely from outline and payoff can be suspenseful in the mechanical sense, but it rarely feels alive. McCarthy, a sharp critic of cant and self-deception, is arguing for narrative honesty: if the author isn’t genuinely at risk of learning something, the reader can sense it. In the mid-century literary world she inhabited, where “serious” fiction often postured as above page-turning pleasures, she folds suspense back into art, insisting it’s not lowbrow adrenaline. It’s the engine of attention, for everyone involved.