Contemplate, imitate

HAVING already put aside the news, sports and real estate sections in order to browse a book review, you may take the title “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them” as a personal invitation. But let those who identify more with the first category be forewarned: Despite the subtitle, this mix of literary essay, artist’s autobiography and intermediate-to-advanced craft advice is very much slanted toward “those who want to write,” and, specifically, to write fiction. Book lovers with no urge to pile another volume onto billions already published may feel more like eavesdroppers than members of the audience -- but, as the author points out, a lot can be learned from eavesdropping. And anyone who agrees that “books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along on a bus” will find “Reading Like a Writer” a jewel of a companion.

Author and teacher Francine Prose (whose widely praised novels include “Blue Angel” and “The Peaceable Kingdom”) has devoted her learning, hard-knock writer’s experience and verbal charm to a labor of love and wonder. The result is engrossing: both light and erudite, daringly insightful and, in some places, bust-out-laughing funny.

Prose’s straightforward (though not simple) method is one she and others have honed over decades of teaching at such institutions as the University of Iowa and Harvard. It starts with the premise that all apprenticeship requires study of (and by implication, a phase of copying) the masters. She regrets that in the current culture of ideological camps and political correctness, fresh discoveries are no longer likely to emerge from “general discussion ... to describe the experience of navigating the fantastic fictional worlds” of, for instance, a Poe or a Borges story. Instead, the key to the kingdom of creative writing lies in what she calls close reading: “beginning at the beginning, lingering over every word, every phrase, every image, considering how it contributed to the story as a whole.”

There’s no obfuscation here, no romanticizing of inspiration as an altered state. The core chapter headings begin with “Words,” continue to “Sentences,” “Paragraphs” and on through the more complex elements called “Narration,” “Character,” “Dialogue,” “Details” and “Gesture.” Each chapter is thickly studded with pertinent quotations drawn from classics known and less known; Prose’s close readings define and illuminate the topics.

“Sentences,” to give an example, nails Hemingway’s debt to Gertrude Stein in his imitated but never re-created style and rhythm. In “The Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway described the bullfighter Belmonte: “Sometimes he turned to smile that toothed, long-jawed lipless smile when he was called something particularly insulting, and always the pain.... “ Now harken back to mentor Stein: “Sentences not only words but always sentences have been Gertrude Stein’s lifelong passion.” The connection between them, the sing-song clarity and attention to word placement, does no dishonor to either writer.

Prose’s pantheon isn’t limited to the Moderns. She apologizes, in fact, for leaning her analysis toward “old” writers, such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, James, George Eliot and Austen. Later chapters also discuss contemporaries like Jonathan Franzen. Throughout, the heart leaps now and then to find personal favorites quoted at length -- Nabokov, Munro, Henry Green, Heinrich von Kleist. And happily, Prose’s selections are all collected in a handy bibliography.

At the end of the day, though, the teacher’s teacher remains Anton Chekhov. Prose passionately supports Chekhov’s argument that “[a] writer is not a confectioner ... not an entertainer; he is a man bound under compulsion, by the realization of his duty and by his conscience. To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist.” But later the doctor would add: “Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything.... And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees -- this in itself constitutes ... a great step forward.” Did Samuel Beckett read this, and take heart? *