NP: Ben Lerner on a Plist topic (at one time). Love James giving him the excluded middle nuance and, yes, I too see some people IRL like this. Don't you?

[Mark Kohut]

"I often hear writers and readers echo E. M. Forster’s famous distinction
between flat and round characters; the former are always the same, say and
do the same things, whereas the latter are complicated, undergo change. At
some point, I replaced this notion with Henry James’s description of Paris
in “The Ambassadors”—likening the city to a jewel, James says that what
“seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.” This dialectic
feels truer to me than any static distinction. My favorite characters in
fiction, like the people I know, tend to resemble James’s Paris—flat then
round, superficial then deep. Then all surface again, if
multifaceted."--in *The
New Yorker*