Noah Smith doesn't read literary fiction

Here are a few reasons why he should

The next Jane Austen book club (about Mansfield Park) will now be on 28th September not 7th September. On 14th September the Shakespeare book club will discuss All’s Well That Ends Well. **These book clubs are now open to everyone. You do no need to pay to attend.**

Everything I write is now free. The paid tier is for archive access only. Please cancel your subscription if you do not want archive access (such as for old Shakespeare posts). I ask for no payment. I ask for no subscriptions to support me or to be nice. More here about why this change has happened.

If you have questions, please email commonreader@substack.com.

---

Noah Smith

writes today that he doesn’t read much literary fiction, even though he enjoys it. This is because, unlike sci-fi and other genres, literary fiction relies on novelty based in character, and those characters are likely to be misleading about the real nature of people.

In fact, many characters in literary fiction are so unusual as to be nonexistent — the author just dreamed up a guy who seemed kind of interesting. The best literary authors are typically incredibly skilled at making up fascinating fantasy people.

But this skill is extremely dangerous, because it can give the reader a false impression of what human beings are like. If you read enough literary novels, you can easily start to believe that sex offenders are really like Humbert Humbert, or that whalers were really like Captain Ahab, or that depressed high school kids are really like Holden Caulfield.

Here are a few points in reply, which I hope will encourage Noah not just to enjoy literary fiction, but to take it more seriously as a way of understanding the world.

1. Noah’s theory of literature is wrong. The novel is “novel” for formal reasons: it is allowed to be freewheeling, realistic, melodramatic, whatever it wants. It is not confined to particular tropes, archetypes, structures, and so on. What other designation can contain Pamela and Proust and Piranesi? When he says “the novelty comes from the characters”, that isn’t exclusively right.

2. Characters are important, but Joseph Andrews and Gulliver’s Travels use character very differently than Scott Fitzgerald. To literary people, these distinctions are important enough to produce long arguments across hundreds, thousands, of books. For the rest of us, the important point is that there is no single way to think about character. There are only people and the myriad ways people can be represented.

3. Economics isn’t the world; it’s a model of the world. Often it’s pretty close to the world, sometimes not. It deals in a particular part of life. Literature is also a model, but not a model that tries to generalise. It also deals in particular parts of life. They are, in this way, complements. If literature isn’t giving Noah what he wants, that might be more of a reason for him to read it.

4. Captain Ahab may not be realistic — you will not meet him on a ship, just as he is — but he is a model of obsession. Of course, there are parts of Ahab that are real, like the cruelty, but the benefit of literary characters is not always that they are realistic. The Last Tycoon gives you a very different sense of Hollywood than Memo from David O. Selznick but both books do get at something real.

5. Tyler Cowen said to me recently: “we all have a little bit of Wuthering Heights in us”. That’s a good way to put the point.

6. Some people only want realism. There is a rich literary tradition just for them. For two centuries, people have talked about knowing Jane Austen’s character as if they were real. Maybe Jane Austen is too remote from modern San Francisco, but Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby are not the novels I would recommend, per se, for someone looking for “real characters”. Willa Cather, for example, would be better.

7. Sometimes you get both. One novel I love is The Fountain Overflows: it is expertly realistic, tromp l’oeil style, but deals with poltergeists and the like.

8. Noah writes: “Literary authors are so good at their craft — so good at producing verisimilitude in their stories — that they can trick readers into believing a distorted version of humanity is the norm.” Or, literary authors are good at writing about the weird, distorted parts of humanity.

9. Those distortions can be helpful. It alleviates our griefs and amuses our woes to read Dickens. A.N. Wilson even told me that reading Dickens as a child helped him to laugh at the abusers in his public school. Some parts of a person can only be known, or best know, through distortion. That’s the benefit of a model.

10. A lot of novels are in fact quite true to life. Brideshead Revisited, at least the first half, is all quite true. The exaggeration you feel on reading it comes from the fact that our most intense feelings are hard to remember. Literature is about tacit knowledge. It makes us realise that we know more than we can say, as Michael Polanyi put it. You might not find the characters in Evelyn Waugh believable, but they were drawn from life. Young Werther might seem crazy, and indeed it is, but it was also real. People in the grip of strong feelings are quite distorted. The Tortoise and the Hare is like this too,

11. Noah prefers observing and interacting with real people. Literature is a huge index of all the sorts of people that there are, possibly exaggerated, but often not. Tolstoy is so close to life you sometimes forget you are reading. Here is what Dominic Cummings once wrote about Anna Karenina:

    When I re-read it aged 46 I was stunned. My own marriage and feelings were there on the page. Some of the arguments and reconciliations between Levin and Kitty almost exactly mirrored those with my own wife! When I looked at my own baby’s fat arm, it ‘looked as if a piece of thread had been tied tightly round the wrist’. So many pages brought tears to my eyes. And in Karenin, an awful shock of recognition. Not only did I recognise him in so many people. But … terrible thought… is it possible that … I too might resemble this awful chacracter in some ways?! Unthinkable surely… Yet…

12. Literature used to be seen not as a vehicle for character, as such, but as a way to conduct moral debates. That’s what Adam Smith admired about Gulliver’s Travels and Richardson’s novels. Smith in fact was strongly influenced by those writers.

13. Why is this all about novels? Poems and plays and essays and all the other things literature produces are good too! Maybe Noah would admire Cowper’s ‘Epitaph on a Hare’. Cowper also wrote well about commerce in The Task, but that’s not a general recommendation.