A Novel for Dummies
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Randall Jarrell once joked that most critics would no sooner ask a creative writer to explain writing than they would ask a pig to judge a bacon-cooking contest. The problem, as Jane Smiley shows in “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel” (Alfred A. Knopf, 560 pages, $26.95), is not that the writer doesn’t know enough about her art, but that she knows too much. As the author of 11 novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres,” Ms. Smiley lives and breathes the medium of fiction. But in this ambitious treatise, the insights she has to offer are not organized in a way that is useful to the student, and her critical arguments are not pursued deeply enough to stimulate the experienced reader. The book remains an appealing heap.
“13 Ways” suffers from Ms. Smiley’s attempt to combine four distinct books in one. It is, first, a critical introduction to the genre of the novel. Wearing her professorial hat, Ms. Smiley sketches the origin of the novel, showing how its prehistory – “The Tale of Genji,” “The De cameron,” “Don Quixote” – laid the groundwork for the modern form invented by Defoe and Richardson. Using these examples and many more, she offers a kind of Aristotelian definition of the novel as “a lengthy, written, prose narrative with a protagonist.” Ms. Smiley draws on her own experience as a writer to show that all the more substantive features of the novel – its plot, point of view, narration, theme – grow out of those basic structural elements. “Because the novel has to be long and organized,” she points out, its protagonist “has to become interesting as he deals with the thing that happens to him.”
This sort of writerly pragmatism – treating the novel not as a literary artifact but as a job that must accomplish certain goals – is the most unusual and valuable thing about “13 Ways.” The second purpose of the book, in fact, is to offer a glimpse into the life of a working novelist. We see how Ms. Smiley herself comes up with ideas, elaborates them into manuscripts, deals with editors and publicists, and manages the ordeals of touring and being reviewed.
The third function of the book is as an inspirational textbook for writing workshops. Her advice to new writers, in the chapter titled “A Novel of Your Own,” tends to be sunny and abstract, in just the way a tree might be if you asked it how to grow leaves: “If your story seems too trivial, then ask yourself about the connections between these circumstances and the larger human condition.” (Oh, is that all?)
Finally, “13 Ways” offers liner notes to 101 novels that Ms. Smiley read over the last three years. The usefulness of her comments ranges widely, from challenging mini-essays on the inadequacy of liberalism in “To Kill a Mockingbird” to little more than a plot summary in the case of “The Sleepwalkers.” As a reader of Ms. Smiley’s robust fiction might expect, she generally prefers novelists of abundant life, like Dickens and Defoe, to those of severe art, like Joyce and James. But the limits of space – she allows about two pages per novel – mean that she is nowhere able to get to the very bottom of her subject. Like the book as a whole, the catalog gives the sense of a project hotly begun, rather than coolly conceived: a method more appropriate to writing novels, Ms. Smiley shows, than to writing about them.