This was the only part of the essay that irked me. Bad writing in general has a low information density; the problem is not exclusive to fiction. It doesn't he

This was the only part of the essay that irked me. Bad writing in general has a low information density; the problem is not exclusive to fiction. It doesn't help that information is embedded structurally in a novel, which makes it harder to tease out. But good fiction (say, Ulysses or Crime and Punishment or Nine Stories) is as rich as any essay or monograph. It's also not clear that density, in the strict sense, is what I'm after when I read. If so I'd be buried in technical papers, when what I really want is something to tickle my brain; to that end, I wouldn't want to lose any one of arXiv, the Engineering library, or the literature section at Borders.