Can a novelist write too well?

At least a couple of times, probably more often, Anthony Burgess declared that Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘too well for a novelist’. ‘Sour grapes’ you may say, remembering that in his own novels Burgess often wrote in clumsy and slapdash style, and that he was perhaps himself a better reviewer than novelist. But it wasn’t just sour grapes. There was an argument behind the opinion. He believed that writing a novel ‘should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey’.

Compare [he suggested] Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End with Waugh’s Sword of Honour. Ford is often clumsy; his sentences stutter; deliberate banalities jostle with brilliant felicities; the prose is struggling to cope with the mysterious and unpredictable. Waugh’s book . . . is created, as it were, out of a known position — that of orthodox Catholic morality — and the style — witty, terse, controlled — corresponds.