Lacking something better, one can use the instrument to hack away at least part of the mystery of how it happens that a critic of Susan Sontag's refined sensibilities can write fiction that is both tedious and demonstrably insensitive to the craft of fiction. As a critic, Miss Sontag has been original, provocative and intellectually rigorous. If her critical writing has not always been entirely lucid, it has been fresh and fascinating, and idiomatically true to itself. Her novels are a different matter. Hardly the same.
Some people are their lives.
Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. In fact, the life that Diddy inhabits is also unreal, as Miss Sontag evolves it. I mean, if nobody's stopping you. A novelist might have stopped before even this early point, and rethought character development, pacing, authenticity of tone and other antiquarian matters of craft. Or the much larger matter of Diddy's potentialities for thought.