“Then why read novels?”

In a recent review of a newly-published novel, I concluded that its “polemic” emphasis made me like it less than I might have otherwise.  Every plot point seemed to be put there in service of an argument against something, a heavy-handed set of choices I began to find distasteful not far into the book.

So an astute friend asked me pointedly, “Then why read novels?” After all, my friend said, you have to concede that the author has a point and wants to voice it. Well, sure. An author has every right to do that.  But my friend meant, I think, to make me look hard at my own choices. If, she was saying, you don’t like a novel to make use of polemic discourse (as Jane Smiley defines it in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel), what do you like — or want — or need — when you choose to read a novel?

An excellent question, which I’d like to tease out a little here at the beginning of a new year, since “novel” means “new” and so far, 2017 is a pretty novel year, and now’s as good a time as any to think about why we should or could want to read novels. (Which I think we should. And short stories too — though I’ll save a discussion of those for another post or two.) For what purposes do we Mormon writers and readers employ novels that might be the same or different from anyone else’s purposes? Do we employ novels in a peculiarly Mormon way that differs from how novels have ever been employed? At first knee-jerk, I don’t think so. But let’s look.

Begin by parsing the term “employed.” A thesaurus reminds us that when we “employ” a book, we “take [it]up,” “engage” it, “use it,” even “exploit” it. Etymology goes further: before 1425, emplien signified devotion. The word came from the Latin implicare, which had the sense of being connected with, enfolding, being involved with (think of “ply,” think of “implicate”). We don’t just read novels — we engage something in ourselves with them, become involved in them, enfold ourselves in them, “not,” says Elisa Gabbert , “to experience life in this world in a different way or through a different medium, but to gain access to another world. Because the worlds of novels don’t just differ from [our] own life in the details; they are different from the actual world. They live in their own multiverse. Even ‘realistic’ novels do not take place on this plane. Even novels based on factual events, by virtue of being novels and not some other form, mean to conjure something novel.”

God says that his work in all the world is to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of [humans.]” Eternal life is not static. Eternal progress means to live, and die, and live again, and expand every time, be new every time. Doesn’t it?

But then how does that dovetail with our belief in a God who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow? What does he think of novels? Couldn’t we say that all of spiritual history, all sacred texts, are novels of a certain kind? Why couldn’t we expect such a thing? Why do we have story after story after story describing people interacting with other people and with forces greater than themselves, if not to illustrate eternal lives?

Hold that thought.

In his huge volume The Novel: A Biography, British scholar and poet Michael Schmidt ¹ weighs in on how involved we can get in novels first by means of Ambrose Bierce’s classic definition: “a short story padded…since it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive part are successively effaced…Unity, totality of effect is impossible…” (10).

Doesn’t the song say, “Truth [is] the sum of existence”?  How can there ever be totality of effect? Aren’t we sort of required to keep reading — or at least engaging with — successive stories? To not just keep reading, or telling, or referring to the same one(s)?

After he quotes Bierce, Schmidt pulls his tongue out of his cheek, sort of. He says the Oxford English Dictionary defines the novel as a genre composed of a long fictitious narrative representing character and action “with some degree of realism.” But, Schmidt says, what we really need to pay attention to is novels themselves. “Actual novels create the expanding space in which fiction exists and is read,” he reminds us. “‘Should’ and ‘must’ knock the life out of imagination. [I really like that. Imagination and faith and creation — there’s fodder for thoughts on fiction.] ‘The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel’ — Edwin Muir’s is a suitable tautology” (10).

So how do you novel?

I have a theory that the older we get as readers, the more discriminating we become, the more we know that want our world to increase in certain directions and not in others. In some ways this bending, this leaning in particular directions is good. It makes completing our life here easier, more efficient. But in some ways it can go bad — we can go rigid, get blindered. I think, though, that it is what it is — this is what happens; we lean in a certain direction and wish for our reading to massage us in that direction, entertainingly and pleasingly. So we choose our novels based on our desired direction(s). If a novel doesn’t expand or increase us in that direction, but merely repeats or echoes what we already know; if it argues against what we know, or makes fun of it, or distorts it for the sake of distorting; then it’s less valuable to us as a novel. Becoming aware of this relationship between our own bending and the novels we read may give us reason to choose new or different novels for specific, expansive reasons.

I like to read novels by Jane Smiley, Liane Moriarty, Rebecca West. Sebastian Barry. Tim Chiang. (Oh, and many, many others too.) These are non-LDS novelists with a few things in common: lovely, smart, lively prose that makes me wake up to the possibilities in sentences; sharp observations about the real world(s) of humans who speak English, so that I see anew what it means to be part of that world; concern about matters of heart and mind, and how they’re affected by social mores and historical events.

But being introduced to Ge Fei, Teffi, Jan Morris, Tove Jansson enlarges my world even more. Different literatures, different cultures, different ways of using language, different lives. More of the sum of existence.

Now, a good story almost always has some degree of “polemic,” since on some level it inevitably argues against something inadequate and for something more. A good story always distorts reality to some degree, in the same way a dream does. John Gardner said a novel should be a “vivid and continuous dream,” and that whatever kicks the reader out of that dream should be removed. But if repetition, complaint, mockery, or distortion is the sole purpose of a novel; if the language is predictable or clunky; if characters and plot points are in the service of a contentious thesis, I tend not to be attracted. I tend to feel that my world has been shrunk, made less than it was—less interesting, less full of wonder, less worthwhile.

Name your favored element of long-form fiction: what can’t you do without? Striking language? Language that “goes down easy” (another of Jane Smiley’s terms)? Larger-than-life characters who turn into heroes? Characters you want to meet? Ways of unfolding the world, or a new unknown world, that both reveal the world you live in and help you see it new? What about intertextuality, i.e. references to other books you know and love? What do you read for?

Finally, the question about reading novels turns us to the question of writing them. Schmidt points out that “the word novelist has survived a variety of meanings….In the late sixteenth century it meant ‘an innovator,’ and it retained this meaning even in the mid-seventeenth century when it also came to mean ‘a novice,’ someone without experience. Novelist: innovator and innocent….Novelist came to mean (with a pejorative inflection) ‘newsmonger…’”(11)

Reading and writing fiction involves us in the process of immortality and eternal lives. Those who write novels make new worlds; those who read them become involved in those worlds, help co-create them and sometimes become devoted to them. We readers and writers of novels allow the “real” world to become something different and better. I think we expand the boundaries of “eternal lives.” Not a small thing.

So what are your favorite novels, Mormon or otherwise? How do they expand your world? And on the other side, what are the least “employable” novels you’ve ever read?  There are significant limits to the thesis that fiction expands boundaries. Let’s talk about them. In the meantime, as a person acquainted with the idea of eternal lives, why do you read novels — and how does that influence how you write them?