Biographers are not in the prediction business, but my premonition is that Javier Marias’s “Written Lives” (New Directions, 192 pages, $22.95) will be regarded as a landmark text in the history of biography. Ostensibly Mr. Marias is reacting against the “age of exhaustive and frequently futile erudition in which we have been living for almost a century now.” Fed up with the surfeit of detail that bloats literary biography, he writes about the essential myth of writers such as William Faulkner, Henry James, Emily Bronte, Isak Dineson, and Ivan Turgenev.

“The idea,” he explains in his prologue, is to “treat these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters, which may well be how all writers, whether famous or obscure, would secretly like to be treated.” By “fictional characters” Mr. Marias does not mean made up, and by myth I do not mean falsehood. Rather, he grants to his biographical subjects the grace of purpose that makes fictional characters so appealing. The mythic Faulkner, for example, appears in the familiar anecdote about his brief tenure at the University of Mississippi post office.

Fired for refusing to wait on customers (they interrupted his reading), he told his family he did not want to be “beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp.” Faulkner did, however, occasionally retrieve mail for patrons, but Mr. Marias does not point out that – unlike the “fat and vacuous” biographies he deplores – because doing so would spoil the story. Mr. Marias prefers to embellish on the legend of the writer who had no time for small talk or subliterary society.

Here is an example of how Mr. Marias ornaments a description of Henry James, transmogrifying the factual into the fictional:

Henry James was a large man, verging on the obese, completely bald and with terrifying eyes, so penetrating and intelligent that the servants of some of the houses he visited would tremble when they opened the door to him, convinced that they were being pierced through to the very backbone. His bald head made him look like a theologian and his eyes like a wizard. And yet he was always highly circumspect and slightly humorous in his dealings with other people, as if he were deliberately imitating Pickwick.

Thus the edges of fiction and fact are blurred without Mr. Marias inventing events or attributing words that James never spoke. Mr. Marias’s craftsmanship is evident in how the “bald head,” for example, performs the double duty of making the eyes more prominent, which in turn leads to the theologian-wizard apercu.

Such passages are “factoidal” – to use a word Norman Mailer coined to define his fudging of the factual with the fanciful. Mr. Marias’s portraits remind me of Lytton Strachey’s economy with details. This limning power derives from the writer’s careful deletions of data. Henry James was not always bald; the theologian and wizard are nowhere in evidence during those rollicking rides in Edith Wharton’s automobiles that enervated cher maitre.

Of course, Mr. Marias would point out that he is no double-entry bookkeeper and is under no obligation to be encyclopedic; indeed his entire method is meant as an antidote to literary biography as documentary on a massive scale. It is more important as a defining principle to describe the wizard and the theologian than to depict the automobile passenger.

Indeed, when he focuses on photographs of famous authors, Mr. Marias discounts the idea that biography should document rather than evoke:

[T.S.] Eliot’s face could easily be that of an essayist, not to say – which would be cheating – the face of a bank clerk, since we know that is what he was. He is a man who has spent decades combing his hair in exactly the same way, and he does not care in the least that his slicked-down hair emphasizes his jug-handled ears, for he is aware that they are what lend singularity to his face. He is meticulous, a perfectionist, and he does not find it an effort to remain so immaculate – it is just a question of habit.

Banker or poet, the numbers and the meter must be in the right order. How could a poet work in a bank? It is not a question Mr. Marias has to investigate:

He has the serene, trusting look of someone who has scarcely any doubts about the world order, because he is basically in agreement with it and will contribute to maintaining it. Nevertheless, his whole face exudes a strange, almost vehement sense of hope, and that is why he could also be an inventor.

Mr. Marias’s reference to “cheating,” however, is a reminder that his elegant, spare prose is only possible because he has read the very gargantuan biographies he belittles. Biographers such as Richard Ellmann and Leon Edel have supplied the many facets of their subjects that Mr. Marias transforms into a kind of synecdoche of the literary life.

He emphasizes this point by including a bibliography of behemoth biographies, although the pedant in me wonders why he includes Ellmann’s Wilde but not his Joyce or why the titles on Faulkner are decidedly out of date, with no mention of Joseph Blotner’s or Frederick Karl’s monumental biographies.

I suspect that Mr. Marias has read more than he is willing to report and perhaps has listed only those works that excited his imagination. In any event, his work points in the same direction as that of novelists such as David Lodge, Colm Toibin, and Emma Tennant, all of whom have used Edel et al. to reimagine the life of Henry James, finding in fiction a way to recenter writers’ lives as gripping narratives. In other words, Mr. Marias is extending what seems to be a growing movement to make of writers lives a new form of literature.

crollyson@nysun.com