A novelist gets to the heart of the matter

JANE SMILEY’S unmediated voice -- blunt, uncompromising and witty -- rings from every page of her engaging meditation “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.” A ferocious intelligence and sharp political sensibility are evident in Smiley’s fiction, but there her personality is rightly subordinated to the demands of story and character; she is, after all, our foremost contemporary practitioner of the traditional, realistic novel, less interested in offering readers a stroll through her consciousness than in examining the interactions of particular people within a specific society. Here, she speaks directly about her beliefs, her emotions and her craft. Casual in tone and idiosyncratic in organization, this study doesn’t so much, in her words, “illuminate the whole concept of the novel” as it illuminates the author’s own conception of the novel and how it works.

Smiley decided to read 100 novels in the fall of 2001 because work on her novel “Good Faith” wasn’t going well. Plenty of writers will dramatically detail their tortured struggles with the muse, but Smiley is characteristically unromantic in describing the “diminished inventiveness as well as diminished pleasure” she felt while working on the book. After the joy of “Horse Heaven,” the author’s favorite of her own writings, slogging dutifully along on this next one “was like dating someone new who was nice enough but not nearly as exciting as the old boyfriend who had moved to Europe.” Smiley’s down-to-earth attitude distinguishes her first 12 chapters, which delineate the history and nature of the novel, as well as the 13th, which contains 101 short essays -- one for each book on her list. (Jennifer Egan’s “Look at Me” was added at the last minute.) She approaches the authors of these works not as timeless geniuses but simply as peers --men and women creating narratives that reflect the issues of their eras.

Yet what Smiley keeps coming back to is the fact that those issues, though different in detail, are in essence similar to the ones we grapple with today. She turned off her computer and (temporarily) walked away from “Good Faith” a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks; her reading list that fall included Icelandic sagas, whose lessons, she ruefully remarks, “had gone unlearned .... [H]ere we were again, with different motives and bigger weapons but with the same sense of injury and vengefulness and the same old wrong feeling that violence could put an end to something.” At the height of the anthrax scare, she was reading “The Decameron,” Giovanni Boccaccio’s chronicle of people in flight from a disease-spawned social breakdown -- the kind once thought inconceivable in the modern age.

The novel’s central preoccupation, as Smiley defines it, is equally enduring. Ranging over a millennium, from Murasaki Shikibu’s “The Tale of Genji” to Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” she finds in almost every book “the tension between the individual and the group.” It’s an eternal tension, and in Smiley’s view, the balance shifts according to each writer’s inclinations. But it can’t tip too far without destroying the novel as a genre -- and, not so incidentally, without destroying the relatively free, more-or-less secular societies within which the vast majority of the novels she surveys were written and take place.

Here we come to the heart of Smiley’s vision -- that the single most important demand a novel makes of us is the willingness to at least temporarily enter other people’s minds and look at things through their eyes. That willingness is in short supply today, she notes: “We seem to live in a world now where all thoughts are focused on the idea of prevailing, of imposing one’s beliefs on others, and no thoughts, no thoughts are given to the costs of prevailing, or even what it means. Have these people never read ‘Moby-Dick’? Well, no, they haven’t.”

How wonderful to meet someone who thinks the world would be a better place if more people had read “Moby-Dick”! And Smiley doesn’t even like the novel that much; Herman Melville is one of the authors on her list for whom she freely admits little affinity. (Among the others are Henry James and practically every avant-garde modernist she dutifully includes.) But if there’s one thing she believes, it’s that reading fiction broadens our sympathies and stretches our imaginations so we understand that even bad guys have their reasons. “When we talk about the death of the novel,” she writes in the book’s most impassioned passage, “what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died .... [T]hey will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well.”

If all Smiley did was affirm the virtues of empathy and reading in a polarized society increasingly focused on visual stimulation and individual gratification, she would have produced a work that is valuable and thought-provoking -- though, perhaps, not a lot of fun. Instead, she inspires wicked delight as she seasons her text with sardonic characterizations (Marcel Proust is “the number one do-it-yourself psychoanalyst” who writes “about the inner life of a slacker”) and cogent deviations from received wisdom. (“[Henry] James takes very seriously the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. I may feel as strongly that the unlived life is not worth examining.”) She’s not afraid to make big statements, but she always grounds them in specific detail. Her discussions of individual novels center on plot, character and such technical issues as narrative strategy, prose style and the rewards or limitations of an author’s chosen genre; the ideas arise from these particulars. Toward the end of the book, she includes two chapters on writing “A Novel of Your Own” that are studded with useful information on rough drafts, rewrites and the different kinds of thinking required at different stages in the creative process. She follows that with “Good Faith: A Case History,” a fascinating glimpse into the life of a working writer, from initial inspiration through reviews to promotional tours.

Inevitably, readers will quibble with some of Smiley’s selections and conclusions. What, no Hemingway? No Twain? Two novels by Wilkie Collins? Is “The Great Gatsby” nothing more than “a vividly written novel of a very young man”? And is “Heart of Darkness” really “an interesting historical document but a bad work of art”? Conservatives will be outraged by her contention that “the novel is in its very organization liberal,” while liberals may balk at her belief that it is “a European form.” (Given this premise, Smiley’s only truly regrettable omission is Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, whose novels explore the dilemmas of a country both Muslim and European.) What really lingers, though, is not any single judgment, but this gifted writer’s profound faith in “the power and vitality of that simple and complex object, a long story bound enticingly between the closed covers of a book.” *