Smiley's People: She and They Are My Kind of People

Add Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (which won her the Pulitzer Prize) and Horse Heaven (her personal favorite of her novels) to the ever-expanding reading list. Her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel is one of the best explanations of why we as human beings love literature and the power literature has over us.

The "Thirteen Ways" actually take up less than half of the book. The second half consists of essays on 100 novels she read between 2001 and 2003 while working on her own, problematic Good Faith. They represent a sort of crash course in the history of the form. Reading only essays on books I'd swallowed up myself, I was stunned by her scathing but very reasoned criticisms on some "classics." I agree Heart of Darkness is underwritten and racist (Take that, Wendy and Sox!). On the other hand, The Great Gatsby may indeed be a young man's book full of young men's emotions and, I now must admit that Fitzgerald's straining for poetry in the opening and closing sections sort of doesn't make sense on closer analysis...but the story itself is too powerful, the exploration of human desire so true, that it will never be anything less than a masterpiece for me. Her accusing the characters of being shallow misses the point...how much of our lives are lived chasing the shallow? Lolita may be more about art and cleverness than actual life...but couldn't the artistic games be read as Humbert's defense mechanism to keep him from dealing with the full implications of a situation he already feels remorse over? And her disavowal of Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady is accurate as it goes, but only if the moral conclusion has to be distinct at the end of a book...the whole idea of the novel being open to interpretation suggests this doesn't always have to be the case. On the other hand, I urge anyone who loves books and knows me to read pages 388-393, her thoughts on Anthony Trollope, "a novelist for adults...[who] makes all those other Victorians seem a little overheated and melodramatic." It is one of the best appraisals of his career and worth there are, ranking with W. H. Auden's "The Poet of the Actual."

The fifty-page stretch of Chapters 7 and 8, "The Art of the Novel" and "The Novel and History," are pages I would give my students to read if I am ever lucky enough to teach literature. "The Novel and History" is absolutely crucial...a thoughtful, swooning, earnest celebration and plea. Smiley asserts that the novel has changed institutions, particularly marriage and the role of women in society, by its creative, rigorous psychological analyses...and that the value of reading novels (to say nothing of the mental back-breaking but gratifying work of writing one) lies in their subversiveness: in collective units like a country, having access to a form of art which is in the end about IDENTITY (all novels rely, she says, on a tension between protagonist, author, and narrator, and are all ultimately concerned with a protagonist's relationship to a group, which he may accept, compromise him/herself for, or be destroyed by) and being able to experience it ON YOUR OWN and DRAW YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS is a potentially earth-shattering statement to make. And in learning about our own selves by examining the selves of others, we develop...and here Charles Dickens is smiling in Heaven...empathy. In fact, Smiley goes so far as to say that if the world is heading towards entropy, it is because men--who are almost always in charge of the world--no longer read novels as they used to, especially in the hard-working worlds of business and government bureaucracy, and future generations no longer read novels asa they used to due to alternatives. We lose in the ability to understand each other and situations...which might one day destroy us. ("Have these people never read Moby-Dick?" Smiley asks in reference to the Bush administration. "Well, no, they haven't.")

The other chapter rejects many accepted "theories" of the novel proposed by James, Forster, Woolf, etc. in favor of an understaning of novels as artistic products freely emerging from the mind of someone in a particular culture who has something to say, based on their sociocultural experiences, which will carry weight with more people, other people. Brilliant.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel is a testament to our spirit which is very easy to read, and may inspire some reading and creation in ourselves.