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Novel approach

By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published September 18, 2005

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL

By Jane Smiley

Knopf, $26.95, 568 pp

It's hard to begrudge a novelist her desire to read a tubload of books. What writer isn't looking for a good excuse? And what better excuse than one's own book purporting to portray the great sweep of novelistic history, from Murasaki Shikibu's thousand-year-old The Tale of Genji to Ian McEwan's Atonement?

Hence Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a disappointingly tepid, gassy, gauzy-eyed "celebration" of the form.

Smiley embarked on the project of reading 100 novels after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 left her emotionally shaken, unable to pursue her own fiction. She went seeking comfort, and discovered in them "an antidote to history."

While she was reading The Tale of Genji, the terrorist attacks grew soothingly smaller. "History is full of crimes and massacres," she observes helpfully. She went on to the Icelandic sagas, but found them "not nearly so reassuring."

Demonstrating the dullness of literary exploration that begins as personal therapy, she points to the U.S. fighting in Afghanistan and offers this squishy insight: People remain thrall to "the same old wrong feeling that violence could put an end to something when most of the time it only spawns more violence."

In a cheesy promotional photo for the book, Smiley poses (clothed) in a bathtub, her body buried beneath an avalanche of novels. She holds aloft an open book in one hand, a wine glass in the other.

Much of Smiley's book, in fact, reads like someone jotting down the casual thoughts, at once rambling and undercooked, that might have occurred to her during a tipsy soak. Many of the capsule novel reviews in the book's final section have a dashed-off, slovenly, first-impression feel.

"A journal of my reading," she calls this section, as if to forestall criticism of its laziness. Smiley will do nothing to deepen your understanding or enjoyment of Ulysses, Lolita, As I Lay Dying, Madame Bovary or The Red and the Black, to take a few examples; nor does she convey enough passion to make it clear why they're worth bothering with anyway.

She declares Lolita complex and intriguing, but does not believe Nabokov's masterpiece a great novel. With a weird reductiveness, she observes that "the only value it expresses is the value of freedom."

Even if promoting "values" were art's ultimate yardstick - an arguable premise - doesn't a psychologically precise, brilliantly lyrical dramatization of corrosive solipsistic love bear moral weight in itself?

Her reading list is cheerfully arbitrary and idiosyncratic. Garrison Keillor is there at No. 92 with WLT: A Radio Romance, but she doesn't include that cornerstone of American fiction, Huck Finn, because she still finds it "boring" (an obvious allusion to her controversial 1996 Harper's article on the subject).

So what did Smiley learn, splashing around in the wonderful whirlpool tub of literary history and trying not to spill her merlot?

From Jane Austen to Tolstoy, from Dickens to Flaubert, the novelistic critique of marriage has prompted real-world changes in domestic arrangements. The novel is "inherently liberal" in that it embraces individualism, depending as it does on distinct characters. It is "inherently political," because it involves multiple characters enmeshed in a social context.

It can be a morally galvanizing force, as with Uncle Tom's Cabin. It encourages both introspection and empathy. In dire times like ours, she notes, "a lively sense of the reality of other consciousnesses on the part of those whose fingers are on the trigger is essential to human survival." She wishes George W. Bush would read something nobler than a children's book about a hungry caterpillar.

A big fan of "capaciousness" in books, Smiley makes her own do double duty as a self-help tract, cheerleading would-be writers through the novel-writing process with some standard advice: ignore the critic within, complete the story arc before rewriting, and "as you aim for perfection, don't forget there is no perfect novel."

No lover of invective - the kind of witty dispraise that might enliven a long book about books - Smiley has a gentle heart and a blandly affable manner. She notes, in her milk-and-water way, that she found certain books on her reading list "uncongenial."

Ulysses frustrated her. Not accessible enough. Her preference is for reader-friendly, demotic works, the novel as the big-tent show, a la Charles Dickens. (She's actually best when she's writing about Dickens, about whom she has genuine knowledge.)

Smiley makes a strong case that novel writing is essentially the work of inspired amateurs. But why must a novelist's reading be amateurish? Rather than bathe in their suds, Smiley would have done better to put these novels under a microscope. I wish she had read fewer books - maybe enough to fit in, say, a sink - and read them better.

[Last modified September 17, 2005, 09:01:03]