I want to talk about the specific pleasure of books that know what they are. Some books try to be more than they manage. Some books are exactly as ambitious as their execution. The second group is actually the more satisfying — a book that is completely what it set out to be is more pleasurable than a book that aimed high and fell short.

The Big Sleep by Chandler is a perfect crime novel. It knows exactly what it is and every choice serves that knowledge. The prose is for this story. The plot is for these characters. Nothing in the novel is borrowed from a different ambition.

This is different from literary minimalism — it's not the absence of ambition but the alignment of ambition with ability. The book wants to do something and does it completely.