Literary Criticism: After September 11th Jane Smiley could no longer write - so she read 101 novels instead.
There's reading, and then there's reading. I've heard Paul Muldoon lament that schools may well teach pupils how to write but not always how to read. Of course we learn in the classroom how to sound the words before us on a page, but Muldoon, I suspect, has in mind the magical process that Briony experiences in Ian McEwan's Atonement: "You saw the word 'castle', and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith's forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade . . . ."
Reading here becomes its own creative activity.
And here's how Jane Smiley puts it: "The basic substance of imaginative literature is not reason but emotion, which is expressed not by the denotations of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the connotations and colorations of the words as employed by the author's style."
No prize for spotting how this weighty tome weighs heavily at times.
For Jane Smiley, September 11th 2001 brought writer's block. She abandoned her almost-finished 250-page novel, with endearing honesty calling it "an already prolonged piece of fraudulence". Feeling "scattered", she summoned her energies and set herself a task: to read or reread 100 novels (originally the plan was 275 - she likes numbers) in an effort to make sense of an increasingly incomprehensible world.
The idea is a good one. Smiley takes a huge canvas and there is no doubting her belief in "the glory of narrative prose" or her interest in aspects of the novel. She includes chapters on the origins, the psychology, the morality and the art of the novel, as well as one on history and the novel. And there's an account of how her own novel-writing got back on track, plus two chapters in which she presumes the reader is interested in writing one. Chapter 10 begins: "Now that you have decided to begin your novel, you may congratulate yourself." Hang on, I've no interest in adding another to the four million novels that already exist. And here's the book's flaw. It attempts to do everything - an unlucky 13. I kept remembering David Lodge's much shorter and sharper The Art of Fiction.
In the chapter The Circle of the Novel, there's even an elaborate clock diagram with 12 (numbers again) schematic headings: travel, history, biography, tale, joke, gossip, and so on . . . Smiley then laboriously tries out her "analog clock" against Middlemarch, "the most novelish of novels". And where's the joke? Lydgate's choosing Rosamund over a "plainer, more genuine girl". Hmm. Rock around that clock.
The second half of the book discusses 101 titles chronologically (from Snorri Sturluson's Egilssaga and Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen, Hermann Broch, Zora Neale Hurston, Naguib Mahfouz, Iris Murdoch, John Updike, Ian McEwan) and between parts one and two Smiley moves from classroom to armchair. These more engaging personal commentaries or "mini-essays", warm invitations to read or reread, were usually written the same day she finished each novel, and their immediacy shows.
Book clubs should find this second half particularly useful and it's a must for the reference shelf. She gives you the gist of a novel without ever giving too much away. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White "is one of the first, if not the first, great novels of detection" and Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children "is not for everyone" - Smiley adds of the latter book that "when I read it a third time (when I had a young family myself) I couldn't stand it".
She looks beyond England and the US to include international works, beginning in 1004 with Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji. On through Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre, who were "much interested in individuals". Who, one has to ask, isn't? Don Quixote is "the first modern novel" and by the time Sterne died "the novel was fully invented and indeed, franchised". She ends with Jennifer Egan's Look at Me, the "one more" (101) from 2001 and one that "gives us a frightening image of the novel subsumed and radically transformed by technology".
There's both off-putting jargon (a novel is "an ontological construct, it is a theory of being") and an inviting personal touch. She tells us that when she first read Austen's Persuasion, "I was younger than any of the characters and now I am older than the author, who died at 42". Indeed she argues that "[ i]t is not what various academic schools consider to be the great tradition that creates the canon, but what novelists themselves read and carry forward when they write".
She proves this point in her analysis of the different novels. Smiley sees the uniqueness of each but offers valuable contexts and connections. Cervantes prefigures Italo Calvino or Robert Coover, and she then quotes Milan Kundera: "Don Quixote is the novel all future novels answer to." That Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea, and JM Coetzee, in Foe, show "the meditation of a modern author upon the power of a classic author" is fair enough, but Smiley's description of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea" as a Flaubertian gambit" seems rather harsh. The Pickwick Papers and Zadie Smith's White Teeth contain a jungle of English dialects and both show "the remarkable effect the English language itself has on the nascent novelistic mind".
The piece on Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is brilliant. If you've read it, your understanding is sharpened; if you haven't you would definitely want to. And how right Smiley is to sum up Jane Eyre with "as satisfying as it is unsatisfying".
Best of all are these succinct insights. Another is Smiley's description of Alice Munro's diction as "refined and almost flat, but marked in every turn of phrase and chosen detail by insight and intelligence. Munro's mind does not appear to be stranger than the reader's mind . . . but it does seem to be wiser".
Reading this book through from beginning to end is not the best way to go about it. Smiley herself warns against it and says that 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel should be used "like an old trunk full of fabric samples or a box of costume jewelry". Rummage about and you'll definitely find something that glitters and suits.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English at Wesley College Dublin
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel By Jane Smiley Faber and Faber, 591pp. £16.99