How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form

by Thomas C. Foster

It’s all rather like Marianne Moore’s line about poetry creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Novelists create imaginary cities and imaginary persons with real crises, real issues, real problems.

The responsibility of setting is to the characters in the story. Their world doesn’t have to be ours, but it absolutely has to be theirs.

Even when the narrator has left childhood behind, looking back through his younger eyes affords the novelist this same defamiliarization of the ordinary, adult world. Charles Dickens uses Pip in Great Expectations (1861), for instance, to critique the notion of gentility as broadly understood in Victorian England. The Russian critic Viktor Schlovsky gives us the term “defamiliarization,” by which he means “making strange,” or turning the familiar and ordinary into something strange and wondrous. This magic, he says, is what literature does for us, thereby making us reexamine what we thought we knew.

There’s a reason Hemingway so rarely resorts to colons and semicolons: Faulkner took them all.

Sometimes at the bookstore, you’ll open a novel, read a page or so, and decide, right then and there, that this narrator is not for you. Too erudite, too low-brow, too smarmy, whatever. You just can’t take that voice for five hundred pages. Or you find yourself absolutely mesmerized by a voice in the first paragraph and you have to have that novel. Ever had that happen? I have. Both ways.

If fiction writers are any good, they only tell you as much as you absolutely need to know.

character creation is outsourced. To you. To me. Writers give us enough to begin to form a picture of a character, but not so much that it will overwhelm us with detail. We supply what else we might need from our own storehouse of information about how people look in the real world.

the Law of People and Things: Characters are revealed not only by their actions and their words, but also by the items that surround them.

Perhaps this is generally true of fictional detectives; they’re almost always less fully developed than main characters in standard novels, yet they seem to have twice as many tics and signs hanging about them.

A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meanings. Anyone who has ever taught literature knows this. Book groups know it, too, whether the individual members have considered it or not. If a novel could only have the meaning that the author had imprinted on it, then all readers would passively accept that meaning, or as much of it as they could process. There would be no need for literature classes or discussion groups beyond simple remediation: for those of you who missed the meaning, here’s what you weren’t clever enough to grasp. That is sometimes the view of beginning literature students. They will come to class and ask, in so many words, “But what does it mean?” as if it can only mean one thing or as if my reading is the only authorized version of the text.

the Law of Character Clarity: To understand characters, you have to know their deepest desires. More often than not, that desire finds an emblem—an object or action—to give it tangible expression.

This is not an epic poem; it’s a novel. Novels aren’t about heroes. They’re about us. The novel is a literary form that arose at the same time as the middle class in Europe, those people of small business and property who were neither peasant nor aristocrat, and it has always treated of the middle class.

The Harry Potter books are, in fact, the most Victorian novels I know of.