The New York Times is the last daily newspaper in America with a free-standing books section. How does reviewing for a newspaper influence or inform your work?

It adds certain constraints: You have to move quickly, and often with less space, and you have to consider newsworthiness. Sometimes it means that I can’t take advantage of complex interpretations or tie in controversies that might arise later in the life span of a book.

There’s also the matter of writing for a general readership. It’s much more interesting to me to write something that has to speak to so many different kinds of people — from experts to amateurs — than it is to write a piece that’s going to be read by people who are already in love with the topic.

Your reviews are often imbued with a rich sense of literary and historical traditions. (You’ve paired Jesmyn Ward with William Faulkner; your latest review quotes Dylan Thomas and references the work of Harold Pinter.) What does the role of tradition play in your criticism?

I love being part of both a tradition of literature and this fantastic, fractious, quarrelsome thing known as criticism, which is part of literature, and on top of it, and alongside it.

Criticism can be a way of adding to a bank of knowledge, a bank of understanding, a way of refreshing and renewing and protecting language.

In scientific fields, there’s this established idea that you’re always standing on the shoulders of giants — that every discovery pushes the whole enterprise forward. When it comes to the arts, though, we don’t talk about things that way. We tend not to say that, because of some novel, we now know X or Y. But I’ve always felt that to be true. Because of the modernists, for example, we have a greater sense of subjectivity.