From The New Yorker, March 8, 2021. James Wood´s review of Kashuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun. (Just now noticing... the New Yorker uses quotation marks for novel titles???)

"The blandness of Ishiguo's narrators is the very rhetoric of their estrangement; blandness is the evasive truce that repression has made with the truth." 

(Part of an argument of how Ishiguro uses estrangement, despite being stylistically 180 degrees from the more famous novelists of estrangement--Nabokov, Martin Amis..., his "blandness" vs their "originality" "rich figures of speech")