Books where character exposition gets done through (sometimes long) conversations ...

[Bink]

Idle wondering ...

I'm reading Richard Ford at the moment, and he makes a great big point of doing character with long passages of people just talking to each other.

I like & am impressed by this, as I think it is genuinely difficult to get that right in a sustained way - lots of authors will stick just to a telling snippet of conversation or two, like soundbites, without having to keep up the dialogue convincingly.

So, I'm thinking, who else does this well? And the only person I could think of, who is the total past maestro of it, is Jane Austen.

Anyone else spring to mind?

Although I haven't read any for a while, Raymond Carver's very good at this.

Thank you - sort of suggests I should do a bit more American contemporary fiction. Cheever, maybe? Bit unread nowadays.

(dh said Thomas Mann, and that that sort of writing was a staple of mittel-European 20th c fiction and didn't I know?, eg somebody who wrote something called An Evening Edged in Gold, ah yes, Arno Schmidt.)

came onto thread to say Jane Austen, but you already mention her. Hmm can't think of any one more contemporary

Some of the hard boiled crime types do this very well - only one who immediately springs to mind is Ken Bruen.