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 | | Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley ISBN-10: 9781400040599 ISBN-10: 1-4000-4059-0 ISBN-13: 9781400040599 ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-4059-9 Hardcover 2005-09-13 Knopf Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Over an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. “Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?” raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro. Smiley explores–as no novelist has before her–the unparalleled intimacy of reading, why a novel succeeds (or doesn’t), and how the novel has changed over time. She describes a novelist as “right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing,” yet whose “job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive.” In her inimitable style–exuberant, candid, opinionated–Smiley invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. She walks us step-by-step through the publication of her most recent novel, Good Faith, and, in two vital chapters on how to write “a novel of your own,” offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel may amount to a peculiar form of autobiography. We see Smiley reading in bed with a chocolate bar; mulling over plot twists while cooking dinner for her family; even, at the age of twelve, devouring Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which she later realized were among her earliest literary models for plot and character. And in an exhilarating conclusion, Smiley considers individually the one hundred books she read, from Don Quixote to Lolita to Atonement, presenting her own insights and often controversial opinions. In its scope and gleeful eclecticism, her reading list is one of the most compelling–and surprising–ever assembled. Engaging, wise, sometimes irreverent, Thirteen Ways is essential reading for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one. In Smiley’s own words, ones she found herself turning to over the course of her journey: “Read this. I bet you’ll like it.” | ||
Reviews | ||
It will rekindle your enthusiasm for reading So many books. So little time. Jane Smiley's "Thirteen ways of Looking at the Novel" won't help you to deal with the sheer volume of new books that are published nowadays. In fact, weighing in at close to 600 pages, it may actually slow progress towards whatever numerical goal you may have set for 2008. Nonetheless, I urge you, I implore you, to get this book and to take the time to read it. Why? Because if you do, you will never read a novel the same way again. I have read no other book that comes close to this one in terms of enriching my overall reading experience. The structure of the book is straightforward. The first twelve chapters, spanning 270 pages, or just under half the book, have titles like The Origins of the Novel, The Psychology of the Novel, Morality and the Novel, The Art of the Novel, The Novel and History. Each reads like a terrific tutorial by the professor of literature you wish you had had in college. Though these chapters are never less than fascinating, for my money it's the next four chapters which make this book so brilliant. They are titled The Circle of the Novel, A Novel of Your Own (I), A Novel of Your Own (II), `Good Faith: A Case History . Basically, Smiley uses the 100 pages or so spanned by these chapters to given an inspired tutorial, of unsurpassed brilliance, on how to write a novel. If I had my way, it would be required reading for all of the Rick Moodys, the Heidi Julavits, the Dave Eggers, the Deborah Eisenbergs, any of those too-smart-for-their-own good writers at work today who continue to foist off their whip-smart, empty-hearted, look-at-me-how-smart-am-I, metafictional experiments on the unsuspecting reader, passing it off as `literary fiction'. In the last half of the book, Smiley analyzes 101 of her favorite novels, ranging from `The Tale of Genji' and `The Decameron' to `White Teeth' and `Atonement', bringing to bear the ideas laid out in the first half of the book. This is done with such wit, intelligence, and sympathy that the effect is to make you want to re-read those books you were already familiar with, and to rush out and get the books she discusses that you haven't already read. In short, this is one of those rare books that is genuinely uplifting, and will rekindle your enthusiasm for reading. I can give it no higher recommendation. | ||
Brilliant, idiosyncratic. This book is excellent and will repay close reading, but I am of two minds. On one hand, Smiley has examined the development and significance of the novel as only a practicing novelist of depth and talent could. On the strength of her treatment I've resolved to try her novels. Any description I might give of her discussion would not do it justice. On the other hand, she clearly has a political axe to grind and this comes out most one-sidedly in her descriptions of novels. First, her history of the novel begins with Murasaki Shikibu's "Tale of Genji," leaps to Bocaccio's "Decameron" as a precursor to the novel in its western form, and then holds a steady course through Cervantes, Defoe, Austen, Dickens, and James into the twentieth century. Perhaps because she has identified as a major concern of the novel the question of "what a woman is for" (her words), Smiley ignores Twain, Hemingway, and modern novelists whose work is not animated by that question. She does not claim completeness for her 100 novels and writes more than once that she is not trying to compile a `Best 100' list, but she does claim a certain disinterestedness that is belied by her choices. She (usually) likes European novelists (nothing wrong with that) and woman novelists (ditto) who pursue her favorite question. Novelists who have nothing to say on the question either leave her cold or don't make the list at all. Hence, she claims not to be able to remember her experience of "Moby Dick" and Joyce's "Ulysses" strikes her as a lot of art devoted to a not very interesting premise. About her contemporaries Pynchon, Delillo, and Wolfe she has nothing to say at all. Second, the idea that failure to read novels caused the badness of our politicians is nonsense. Lincoln wasn't a great reader of novels, nor was Washington. I don't deny that people well-read in good novels might as a result develop empathy but Smiley seems not to believe there are other routes to the same destination. Furthermore, plenty of very good leaders, not to mention good people in general, claim that daily contact with the Bible helps them to love their neighbors as themselves. GWB's treatment of Iraq doesn't strike Smiley as loving enough (one might say "Christian enough"): fine, but this is not grounds for blaming the Bible and Bush's poor education. Where should we believe Mother Theresa or Dietrich Boenhoeffer learned their love of humanity? Third, J.S.'s history of the novel, though accurate as far as it goes, doesn't make sense given her concerns. She includes "The Tale of Genji," which had zero influence on the novel's early development in the West, but excludes medieval saints' lives, which I expect influenced the "Decameron" and are sources for the reader's experience of interior truth she believes is a defining characteristic of the novel. She will claim she had to start somewhere but why not consider the source of the novel's interiority, since she places so much emphasis on that quality? The primary source of western interiority is the idea that the soul has to answer to God in conscience. This fearful relationship between self and deity was illustrated in hundreds of saints lives. A frequent element in the stories of female saints is the refusal to do the socially expected thing--marry a man--in favor of maintaining chastity. Tales like this dramatize the sense of self against other that grew as Christianity spread. This crisis deepened during the Protestant Reformation and it should not surprise us that the novel's development began as Luther and Calvin were claiming that the soul's isolation was even more absolute than Christians had previously believed. Finally, had she looked she would have found several long, plotted, prose works that predate "The Tale of Genji" by several centuries: the novel has perfectly fine ancient roots in the Greek romance and other long prose works of antiquity, such as Apuleius' "Metamorphosis" and Petronius' "Satyricon." So, brilliant and idiosyncratic, just as I believe Smiley wanted it. Buy the book. | ||
Such promise, such disappointment I read the first few chapters and thought this was not a bad book. The author often has to stretch to tie her point to her examples but was keeping my interest. And then it happened! What so many of today's "accomplished" writers can't avoid. A completely useless and bombastic attack on the Bush administration stuck in the middle of the book. Whatever your political views, these pages are confused and embarassing. A nice 3-4 star book of criticism and advice destroyed because our author could not contain her hatred and bile. My reading group (2 conservatives, 2 moderates and 3 liberals) voted 7-0 to stop discussing this book after hitting this passage. Leave political commentary to the hundreds of hacks across the spectrum. | ||
A couldn't-put-it-down book of criticism! I guess it is well known that Smiley is a witty, intelligent, and congenial writer but this book nevertheless surprised me. I didn't want it to end! I found myself hoarding the pages of the penultimate essay the same way I do with the closing chapters of a novel I am enjoying. I will now have to re-read to figure out how she accomplished this (can it be simply a matter of voice?), but in the meantime want to recommend it to all comers. Just delightful. | ||
Three studies within one cover This compendium falls into three parts, more or less. The first section offers Smiley's survey of how the novel evolved. Here, she emphasizes the importance of Bocaccio's Decameron and Marguerite de Naverre's Heptameron, two collections of stories grouped around a tale-telling symposium, more or less. The first stresses the humanism and the joy of human relationships; the second cautions humans about the danger of such relationships. Here, Smiley finds the tension that characterizes the subsequent four centuries of what becomes, with the rise of literacy and the spread of affordable books, the novel as we know it. Her 22 years spent teaching university in Iowa show in her analysis. Some readers may be lulled off to sleep by her rather academic considerations; as a literature lecturer myself for about the same amount of time that she taught, I found these introductory chapters a bit too longwinded--she continues as the pages pile up to elaborate points already made, and at times I felt like she had to stretch her material to fit, well, 13 chapters no matter what. Still, it taught me a lot that I had not learned in the classroom myself, and it's useful for any reader as an overview or summation. Despite the rather too-professorial pace, she does come up with a few memorable remarks in these first 200 pages. For instance, that Don Quixote, shown to conveniently nod off whenever the talk turned to amours, began a tendency for the novel (for much of its evolution) to avoid explicit depictions of sex. That the English novel tends to lead up to marriage, while the French equivalent starts off with marriage--or its stagnation after the honeymoon's faded. How drama inflates its protagonist while novels deflate their main character's pretensions or aspirations. Or, in her opinion with which I disagree, why Ulysses and what she critiques as too-mannered a fictional rendering distances fatally the novel from its natural milieu where the reader--and the writer--belong. I never have read a Smiley novel, so that puts me in either an uninformed or fresh reception for her next section. She takes the making of her novel "Good Faith," and shows how she took an anecdote told her from real life and worked it into a novel. I admit that while I have no interest in reading GF after encountering her account of its construction, the process described was told--being from the inside rather than via a critic after the fact--in an informative and insightful manner. But it's still a bit clumsy; if you have not read GF, then the coyness with which she gives some details and withholds others (so as not to spoil the plot) does prove awkward, as this novel's not exactly as familiar for most of us as many of the others she peruses in the 101 listed in the final section. I did find her reactions to reviews, her book tour experiences, and her struggles with knowing when to stop writing informative, however. This led into a chapter in which she addresses the reader as if he/she seeks advice on how to write a novel, too. This chapter felt as if imported from a previous article; it aroused for me absolutely no interest in writing one, and its place in this otherwise reader-oriented collection seemed precarious. But others will no doubt be invigorated by it. For the final section, the second half roughly in length of the book, the 101 novels she lists and summarizes rather briskly--as she points out, often overlapping with the previous chapters that were written after she had drafted the notes on the 101 novels as she read them, offers far less enticement than I'd have expected. I thought I'd find many novels that I'd never heard of, or always had wondered if I should read but hadn't known enough about to sample. She did get me to search out Gogol's novella "Taras Bulba," one I'd never encountered. But many of her titles are already familiar, standard-issue for reading groups, English majors, or the "common reader" that Virginia Woolf could once expect to find out in the educated public. This is not meant as a put-down, but there were fewer rare and previously hidden or neglected finds in her list than I'd have liked. Contrast this to the increasingly middlebrow types of novels that populate her list as it moves into the latter 20c. This on the one hand is unsurprising; this is the same category that Smiley herself writes for--the respectable popular "trade paperback" by the classier imprints from usually mass-market publishers. But I found really no new books in the more recent decades to seek out after reading her reviews. She too often does not show the faults of what she reads--such as Ian McEwan's "Atonement" being a refreshing and too rare inclusion of why she did not think a novel "worked"--and her generally sunny acceptance of the stack she plowed through does speak for her optimism and good-natured encouragement of her fellow writers. Again, I tend towards the more difficult novel than most of the people reading this book would, so I admit my snobbish prejudice! Smiley does enjoy the benefits of much more leisure than most of us, riding horses in Carmel Valley, reading to her heart's delight, and taking the Course in Miracles--a paragraph early on praising this for her own recent transformation still seems baffling to me, alas. For we busier folk, her own foray through a few years of reading her way through the big bedside stack we bibliophiles all dream of having does show her commonsense and accessible approach to explicating how novels are made, why they work, and which ones worked best for her. While each of our stacks would differ from hers, she does provide in this hefty volume (a good value for the price) enough for any reader to learn and debate with her from the comfort of our own armchair or pillow. | ||