Randall Jarrell, the great American critic and poet, once defined the novel as, "an extended piece of prose fiction with something wrong with it". Now, nothing is perfect and you don't have to look very hard to find something wrong- or perhaps just something you don't like - about any work of fiction you care to name. Where, we might ask, does the editor come into this? And is it beneficial to an author to have an editor who is also a novelist? You would think that being a writer themselves, familiar with the process of writing a novel and its demands, they would be able to get inside the head of the author, and be sympathetic and understanding of what needs to be done. This is not an unreasonable assumption to make. However, is it not possible that there is an opposite side to this? Editors might, from their experience as writers, possibly unconsciously, try to make over the submitted novel as they themselves would have written it. The ideal, one supposes, is for the editor to see the book through the author's eyes, but if they apply their own creative talent to the job they might end up seeing it too much through their own eyes and, in this way, take no account of the author's original intentions.