Jane Smiley
13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL
What to read and how to write
596pp. Faber and Faber. Paperback, £16.99.
0 571 23110 1
Michael Dirda
BOOK BY BOOK
Notes on reading and life
160pp. Henry Holt. $17.
0 805 07877 0
Writers hate getting stuck. Most drink tea. Some take to the bottle. Others go for long walks. A few give up altogether. The Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist Jane Smiley began a guide to reading and writing. Her block had been due to a combination of factors. It was partly a feeling of despondency after 9/11. “Fear was everywhere”, she recalls. “Fear of anthrax, fear of nuclear terrorism, fear of flying, fear of the future.” She had also lost faith in the book she was writing. As a response, and possible cure, Smiley set about reading a hundred novels, and thinking about the ways in which they worked. The result, a work of nearly 600 pages, combines discussion of aspects of the novel with summaries of the hundred books that she read, ranging from Boccaccio and Cervantes to John Updike and Ian McEwan.
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel attempts to isolate a novel’s essence. The first half of the book, falling into thirteen parts, includes questions of “The Origins of the Novel” and “Morality and the Novel”, and offers two sections on the experience of writing. Sometimes highly taxonomical, Smiley uses diagrams, seeing the novel as the central station of a clock face “and the forms of discourse it is related to arranged around the circumference”. Elsewhere, she offers her personal experience of novel-writing as an aid to definition. Her broadest claim is for the novel’s “commonness”. It is, she argues, “its most humane and human aspect”:
“Every novel, then, is a guided meditation on a common thing, common both in the sense of “mundane” and in the sense of “shared” – action and reflection as perceived from a particular point of view . . . . It is hard to overestimate the importance of this quality of commonness to the nature of the novel; it enables a reader to relax with a novel as with another person, and also to feel as though the novelist might have something to say of relevance to the reader’s common life.”
Smiley’s book has the lure of comprehensiveness. So much girth promises some new understanding. What it offers, in fact, is explanation. It is, as T. S. Eliot pointed out, all too easy to confuse the two. The passage above invites a number of questions. Is reading always relaxing? Is it the same as relaxing “with another person”? Perhaps this therapeutic intimacy is what happens when Smiley turns the pages; in interview, she has argued that novels offer us a useful, and indeed crucial, “training” in “sympathy” and “empathy”. One is left wondering what we are to do with reading experiences that involve us being titillated, horrified and pleasantly thrilled at the same time.
The problem that Smiley skirts around is the fact that it is very difficult to talk about what is common to readers, let alone what is common to humanity. It is a tension indicated by the fact that for her British readers, the word “common” separates as much as it brings together. Both Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf wrestled with the same idea, but overall one feels that Smiley’s take on the common reader falls short. Perhaps borrowing her title from Wallace Stevens was tempting fate. As the guide unfolds, one senses that the author has accidentally picked up some of the poet’s worst qualities. There is a grandiosity about the writing. This is partly to do with the scale of the project, but it is heightened by the fact that Smiley repeatedly refers the reader to her own novels as case studies. By the nineteenth mentioning of her novel Horse Heaven, one feels that Smiley both believes in the notion of “supreme fiction” and reckons that she has gone some way towards producing it. She also shares Stevens’s capacity for prejudice. Take her account of narrative time and sequence:
“Because narrative is so natural, efficient and ubiquitous, it, like prose, can be used in myriad ways. The time sequence can be abused however the writer wishes to abuse it, because the human tendency, at least in the West, to think in sequence is so strong that the reader will keep track of beginning, middle and end, on her own. Nevertheless, the commonest bus driver can and often does take an interest in what happens next, and so because the novel requires narrative organization, it will also be a more or less popular form. It can never exclude bus drivers completely . . . .
One is tempted to throw something. Perhaps a copy of the former bus driver Magnus Mills’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Restraint of Beasts. The snobbery of this passage nearly disguises the fact that it doesn’t make sense. While an “affinity for language”, Smiley reassures us, “is common”, she notes that for some writers there is a “difficulty” in “fixing on an authentic language that communicates the inner life as well as it does the communal life”. While this is well put, it is not a difficulty that seems to concern her project. The frustration with 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is the fact that it fails to acknowledge the problem of abstraction that is implicit in all genre criticism: the problem that, in an attempt to locate “common” features, one may miss “the beauty of inflections”.
Michael Dirda’s brilliant Book by Book: Notes on reading and life attempts something different. In this slim volume, another Pulitzer Prizewinner (Dirda won his for criticism) offers an insight into his own “inner life” as a reader, not through explanation, but through sharing his reading collection. In no way comprehensive, the book aims to be:
“a florilegium: a “bouquet” of insights or provocative quotations from favorite authors surrounded by some of my own observations, several lists, the occasional anecdote, and a series of mini-essays on aspects of life, love, work, education, art, the self, death.”
Dirda is a hospitable guide. He makes suggestions for what to put in a guest bedroom bookshelf, shares the quotations that he keeps around his desk, and reminds us that flossing our teeth is just as important as reading. (“The young, especially, can hardly imagine the expense, pain, and trouble of dental care in later life.”) He would surely concur with Emerson that there “are books which rank in our lives with parents and lovers and passionate experiences”. But this is also a book about the things that books can’t do. “There’s more to life than reading”, he points out.
In the end, Jane Smiley’s book, drawing on its post-9/11 status, seems symptomatic of the worst aspects of the criticism of our climate: it sees novel-reading as a sort of salvation. Such works involve an oversimplification of criticism itself. “[O]ne desires / So much more than that” – as Stevens puts it. One is grateful that Michael Dirda recognizes this.
