On More than one occasion in recent years, usually in conversation with quite intelligent people who report to me that they have stopped reading fiction, I have found myself claiming to have been educated by novels. An interesting phrase; but what does it actually mean? Were I to tot up all the books I have read in thirty or so years as an adult, novels might or might not outnumber other kinds—history, philosophy, social science, belles-lettres, but, more than those others taken together, novels, I feel, have been the most decisive in forming my character. They have been decisive in giving me a method or style of thinking, a general point of view, and a goodly portion of such understanding as I may have of the world.

I want to get at how this has come about, but first I should note that novelists have themselves been among the first to warn that reading too much fiction can be a dangerous thing. Don Quixote, Cervantes’s poor noodle of a knight with the doleful countenance, is driven nearly mad by the fantastical novels he reads. In more than one of her books, Jane Austen’s characters have their views distorted, and hence their good sense thwarted, by reading too many of the wrong sort of novel, and reading them indiscriminately. As for Emma Bovary—“Don’t esk!” as Molly Goldberg used to say; Flaubert makes it plain that her ruination is owing in good part to too rich a diet of romantic fiction. Irving Kristol, who so far as I know has written no fiction, is reputed to have counseled young business students never to bring a novel to a job interview, lest they be taken as somehow distracted and dreamy. Sounds like good advice.

At the same time, some of the most interesting non-literary minds I know, and know about, are, and have been, passionate readers of novels. Justice Holmes read Conrad, Hardy, Henry James, and the other serious novelists of his day. (William James, Holmes’s contemporary, had a hard go with the novels of his brother Henry.) Freud, who claimed to have acquired much of what he knew from “the poets”—by which he meant literary artists of all kinds—once wrote to Arthur Schnitzler, the Austrian novelist and playwright who had himself been trained as a physician: “The impression has been borne in on me that you know through intuition—really from a delicate self-observation—everything that I have discovered in other people by laborious work.” John Maynard Keynes read novels. In our own day, Edward Shils has read a vast quantity of fiction, 19th-century, modern, and contemporary, and constantly rereads Balzac and Dickens, as one might think every good sociologist ought to do. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz makes it his business to keep up with contemporary fiction.

In the only case I know in any detail, my own, a heightened excitement accompanied the reading of novels from the very beginning. Not that I failed to get worked up by other books. My reading life began in earnest at the University of Chicago, where—in the most sensible of radical curricular reforms—no textbooks were used in the College and few books by living writers were taught, and so the intellectual diet was for the most part champagne and caviar. I can recall the deep pleasure of reading Herodotus, the intellectual provocation set in motion by Thucydides. Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were offered in plentiful supply, gave an unformed mind a good workout; and although I knew I had not the least chance of attaining anything like mastery here, I did come to adore Socrates, as Plato intended. I recall being devastated, at nineteen, by Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, taking every dark word in that gloomy little tome to my youthful heart. I remember, too, the awe I felt upon first reading Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—awe at the spectacle of a writer handling and shaping ideas and making intellectual connections with such easy virile brilliance.

But novels really set me aflame. “The main question as to a novel,” wrote Sydney Smith, “is—did it amuse?” Although such novels as I had read as a child did amuse, else I would not have allowed then to detain me, even when quite young I sensed that something more than amusement was going on. In high school, I went through a brief jag of reading novels with slum settings; among their titles were The Amboy Dukes, A Stone for Danny Fisher, The Hoods, Knock on Any Door. These were all, I now realize, in the mode of a cut-rate naturalism whose chief message was that no one had much chance of rising above his environment. I lapped them up, not so much for the message (which I probably also swallowed) as for the details of slum and criminal life.

I remember finding these details not only exotic, as they would be to a boy born into the comforts of the middle class, but persuasive and, somehow, useful, though for what I could not with any exactitude say. Nevertheless, bits of these inferior works cling to my memory even today. (“The big boat pulled into the night, and Cockeyed Hymie thrilled to the sensation of the clutch.”) If writers with names like Irving Shulman, Harold Robbins, Harry Grey, and Willard Motley could excite me like this at sixteen, imagine what lay in wait for me down the road at twenty from writers with names like Fielding, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann.

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When I first encountered the great novelists, though I was far from being up to them, I nonetheless knew right off that what they wrote contained as high a truth quotient as I was likely to get from any other kind of writing. Philosophy, for which I had no natural bent, seemed to me to come at things at too high, too abstract, a level. Even so brilliant a writer as Plato struck me as ultimately playing a game—a complex and wondrous game, to be sure, played in splendid style, but in the end still a game. I had been born into a family where common sense was too greatly esteemed ever to take seriously any sort of schematic thinking. Thus the small portion of Marx offered at the University of Chicago was sufficient for me to understand only how other people could fall for it. Like many another student who read Freud too young, I was briefly taken with Freudian doctrine, until I tested it against my own sense of the world and my own sense of humor (“They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?,” Max Beerbohm once remarked) and found it wanting. I liked the exultation of poetry practiced on the highest plane, but I never for a minute felt I could live for long on that plane, where the air was so pure and thin. Perhaps I am speaking to no more than my temperamental and intellectual limitations, but the novel, I early felt, was the most fruitful form, literary or otherwise, going.

I read a great many novels at the University of Chicago, most on my own but some for the classroom, though I had no gifted teachers in this area. One, a nervous and highly irritable young assistant professor, had us read a survey of works from The Princess of Cleves to Ulysses and including novels by Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Proust, and Thomas Mann. A more distinguished man, Morton Dauwen Zabel, who had been an editor of Poetry and was a friend of Edmund Wilson’s, taught a course in the modern novel that introduced me to such writers as Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, and Evelyn Waugh, but that otherwise, despite the impress left by Zabel as a cultivated man of letters, was not memorable.

I have since become a teacher myself, and one who frequently teaches courses built around novels, and I must say that I do not think of myself as doing much better than my own early teachers. I tend not to teach those abstruse or arcane books that permit a teacher to step proudly to the lectern and act as a guide to the perplexed. Instead I attempt to show how a given novel works, what moral issues and questions it raises, what is the particular quality of its artistry, and, finally, what its author thinks about the world. If one can do that much with clarity and force, I think one has done pretty well. Yet even when I have done this much, I always feel that I have left out a great deal that is important to the pleasure and point of the work. One can teach a poem so that every word, semicolon, and blank space is exhaustively accounted for, but, somehow, after having taught a novel one generally feels that many of the best parts have been left on the pedagogical equivalent of the cutting-room floor. Or I at least tend to feel this way.

There are of course ideas embedded in novels and there are, as a subdivision of the form, those books called “novels of ideas.” But when you have extracted or identified the ideas, I am not sure that you have a whole lot to show. If you determine that Proust in Remembrance of Things Past was operating with Bergsonian concepts of time, or that in The Magic Mountain Mann was able skillfully to represent the maelstrom of European political ideas of the day, what, really, have you determined? Perhaps that you would have done better to read Bergson directly, or that, having read Mann, you ought now to move on to a sound intellectual history of Europe between the wars. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, while novelists may have a plenitude of ideas, it is rarely their ideas that are the most interesting thing about them.

Or consider the case of Theodore Dreiser, who I happen to believe is the greatest American novelist. Dreiser’s ideas, at any rate those that ruled his life outside his novels, are generally appalling in their coarseness. A convert to Communism who found himself sympathetic to Hitler, he may have been the only man in America made happy by the Nazi-Soviet pact; he was an anti-Semite; he was a worshipper of power; he was a rather crude Social-Darwinist—ideationally, Dreiser was a mess. Yet within his novels, these and other ideas function, if at all, more on the level of notions, and they have little to do with Dreiser’s very real power as a novelist. I am not altogether sure what does. On the occasions when I have taught a Dreiser novel to undergraduates, I have often wanted to begin by saying, “Look here, this guy Dreiser was homely and horny and born into a household where superstitious religion and shame ruled, all of which helped to render him into a writer who probably knew more about desire than any man who ever lived. So with that in mind, go home and reread this novel.”

One day, in an essay by Desmond MacCarthy, I came across the following sentence: “It is the business of literature to turn facts into ideas.” Exactly and just so, I thought, and handsomely formulated into the bargain. To turn the fact of Desmond MacCarthy’s aphoristic sentence into an idea, he is saying that the method of literature, if method it has, is induction, reasoning that runs from the part to the whole, the particular to the general. Other branches of learning have claimed to operate inductively—science, social science—but there are grounds for thinking they do not, that in fact they are testing, hopefully, hunches. But novelists, unless they are corrrupted by their own politics or pet views, are not out to prove anything. They tell their stories, and if they tell them truly and well, honestly and persuasively, somehow things will (as we used to say around the English department) “resonate” into something more general and larger, and all those little frogs of fact that novelists concern themselves with will turn into princes of ideas—which, as MacCarthy says, is the business of literature.

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Why, it might be asked, does literature have to have a business at all? Is it not sufficient that it give pleasure, convey information, widen experience, provide flashes of insight? One reads the world’s finest novels, plays, poems, and in time one becomes a more cultivated person, which means somehow more refined, subtler, deeper, even—though this might be pushing it—better. You are what you read; and culture, like heredity and third-class paint, rubs off. I could go on with this catechism of once-hallowed assumptions, although at this point I feel the need to show slides or at least roll out a pumped-up quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson. All these things may be true—with slight qualifications, I believe them—but they nowadays have an empty ring. As perhaps never before, the study of literature is being asked to justify itself, and thus far it has not done so very convincingly.

I know that I have felt the need for a justification of literary study, beyond the standard one of self-cultivation that is at the core of the liberal arts. As I stand there pointing out the intricacies of a novel by Joseph Conrad in a classroom that features a boy with a dangling earring and a girl in a spiky punk haircut, it occurs to me to ask what it is, exactly, that I am doing. Meanwhile, in a room down the hall, a colleague is giving a course in Third World writers much of which, I assume, is devoted to attacks on the West and especially the United States. Upstairs, other teachers are using literature to push their own particular lines: feminism, deconstruction, and the rest of it. Against the crude juggernaut of politicized teaching, which appears to have affected literature departments almost more than any others in the contemporary university, one wonders how effective traditional teaching, with its emphasis on the moral and aesthetic elements in literature, can continue to be.

The critic Robert Alter has, I suspect, felt doubts similar to my own, or so I judge by the appearance of his new book, The Pleasures of Reading,¹ with its significant subtitle, “Thinking about Literature in an Ideological Age.” Alter is now a senior professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he teaches Hebrew and comparative literature. I mention especially the latter because, in today’s university, departments of comparative literature, once the preserve of the multilingual and the erudite, have tended increasingly to become headquarters of academics priding themselves on what is now known as literary theory, or, as they call it in the trade, plain “theory.” Theory in current literary studies usually means batting around the dependably less than lucid writings of Lacan and Derrida (les frères Jacques, as John Simon once called them), Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, or some other Frenchman of the month. As for literary Marxists and feminists, they get on happily enough with the theorists, and together they form a jolly daisy chain of “isms.” To all this, Robert Alter offers a happy exception.

Although “theory” has been in business for more than a decade now, modern literature theorists, so far as I know, have produced little in the way of brilliant books or essays. But then they tend to write exclusively for one another; and everything they turn out might as well be marked “to the trade only.” As Alter notes in his introductory chapter, entitled “The Disappearance of Reading,” the theory crowd does not much go in for reading actual literature; he states his suspicion that “many young people now earning undergraduate degrees in English or French at our most prestigious institutions have read two or three pages of Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva for every page of George Eliot or Stendhal.”

Early in The Pleasures of Reading, Alter notes that, though his book is in part a response to the peculiarities of the new literary theory, “it is meant to be a good deal more than a polemic, for I am convinced that there are more interesting and more important things for a critic to do than merely expose fashionable absurdities.” One understands Alter’s unwillingness to stride into the Big Muddy of literary theory, though the element of his book that is polemical in intent does, it must be said, suffer as a result. But mainly what Alter chooses to do is to put on display the traditional modes of literary study, among them the investigations of character, style, allusion, structure, perspective, and interpretation. In so doing Alter, a man now in his middle fifties, shows still the enduring marks of having once been a student at Columbia (and subsequently at Harvard) at a time when Columbia was the gem of American English departments. Lionel Trilling, F.W. Dupee, Richard Chase, Andrew Chiappe, and others taught at Columbia then, and along with imparting a good grounding in literary study, they passed along a metropolitan spirit that for the vast most part seems absent from academic life today and especially from the crabbed style of contemporary literary academics.

Robert Alter has retained much of the Columbia spirit in the best sense. Certainly it has always pervaded his criticism in COMMENTARY and elsewhere. If The Pleasures of Reading suffers more than seems to me absolutely necessary from a certain academic stuffiness or touches of classroom condescension, this does not detract from the fact that Alter’s main points in The Pleasures of Reading are not academic but real ones. First among these is his insistence that “without some form of passionate engagement in literary reading, the whole enterprise of teaching and writing about literature becomes pointless”—and so, for that matter, does literature itself. Second is “that the language of literature is distinct from the use of language elsewhere in its resources and in its possibilities of expression,” and that the investigation of how language is used in literature is not merely a game—however much it can be, as Alter says, “high fun”—but in various ways an aid to understanding the world.

These points may seem a bit obvious to anyone not in a university, but it needs to be reiterated that, within universities, ours is one of those times when, as Orwell once remarked, it is the duty of an intelligent man to repeat the obvious. For today the ascendant views in literary education hold that the language of literature is chiefly self-reflexive, that literature itself is either a game or a swindle, and that the best literary criticism is politics by other means, when it is not another technique for demonstrating that reality does not exist. By reiterating the older and greater truth about literature, and by demonstrating its enduring power through a series of highly intelligent readings of individual works, Alter’s book reminds us why we were attracted to literary study in the first place.

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Wayne C. Booth, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is not one of those professors out to prove that reality does not exist. In The Company We Keep² he proposes, as his subtitle advertises, “An Ethics of Fiction,” and he does so precisely in order to allow reality to obtrude on the reading and study of novels. Booth wishes to investigate the “ethical quality of the experience of narrative in itself,” as well as the ethical consequences of various novels and the positions their authors take through the representations in their work. It is a large subject, and he has written a large book about it.

The Company We Keep, unfortunately, is also a vastly bloated book. Booth has the academic author’s disease in extreme form. His idea of a chapter is to begin with five or six epigraphs, to include twenty or thirty discursive footnotes—he writes, incidentally, some of the best vanity notes in the business, directing us to other things he has written or is planning to write on connected subjects—and then to close with a bibliography often containing more than a hundred items. His is also one of those muddle-making books in which the author promises in Chapter 2 to discuss a related point in Chapter 11, while in Chapter 13 the reader is asked to recall a point raised some three hundred pages earlier in Chapter 3. Here, to give a small sample of the reigning tone, is a fairly typical footnote:

1. My article comparing the ethics of the “video” arts and the verbal arts (1982) has been read by some as a biased attack on “viewing” as opposed to “reading” and “listening.” Not so. At one time I intended to include a revision as a chapter here, since obviously the different ethical effects of entire media are inherently a part of our subject. But on reflection, especially after W.J.T Mitchell’s Iconology (1986), I decided that the subject requires another book. Perhaps. Here I can simply assert that the experience of video as now commercially determined is in my view a cultural disaster.

To grasp the self-important and obvious spirit of The Company We Keep you have to imagine Dwight Macdonald without any of the wit.

In his attempt to delineate the complex ethical transaction between reader and novelist, Booth remarks that “the authors who become our lasting friends are those who offer to teach us, by the sheer activity of considering their gifts, a life larger than any specific doctrine we might accept or reject.” This sounds sensible enough; yet in Booth’s own practical criticism, it turns out, the “ethical” generally means only that a novel has to pass what is today considered OK liberal thinking in the academy, especially on such matters as gender and race. Thus Booth reports that his estimate of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest “has diminished steadily on each new encounter, either with the text or in conversations about it, especially with female readers. . . .” The problem, he has come to realize, is with the character “Big Nurse,” who, he now reports, “too crudely symbolizes not only ‘female’ domination of what ‘should’ be a man’s world but also all civilized restraints.”

My own guess is that Booth originally admired Kesey’s far from first-class novel precisely for its general attack on society and on society’s system of civilized restraints. He was, in my view, wrong about it then and he is wrong about it now—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has always chiefly been a book for a certain kind of teacher to put on his reading list to show students he is on their side. Nevertheless, Booth seems quite pleased with his own splendid flexibility, and adds: “Who can predict what a further reading, at age eighty, will yield?” In Booth’s case, I believe I can predict what it will yield—namely, a rough congruence with whatever then passes for acceptable academic thinking. Still, the thought of Booth or anyone else reading a Ken Kesey novel at eighty does not go down easily, except perhaps as a peculiarly just punishment for a contemporary literary academic.

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But then Wayne C. Booth appears never to have read a book he did not like, or to have encountered a contemporary academic political or literary movement or idea he could not respect and learn from. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, a caring person, and the reason we know this is that he keeps telling us so. But he was not always thus, as he freely admits: as a young man, he recited what he now realizes were sexist passages from Rabelais “aloud to my young wife, as she did the ironing (!),” and he assigned Orwell’s 1984 to his students in a spirit of self-congratulation at being “a passionate enemy of McCarthyism whose own life and opinions were in no need of change.” Today, however, he is a more open fellow, confiding how he cried during the movie The Color Purple, or learned from Edward Said “to feel uneasy with the word [Oriental] even when it is enclosed in quotation marks.” If he once excluded the novels of D.H. Lawrence from serious consideration, dismissing Lawrence as “a pretentious little preacher,” now—thanks to his notion of thinking of writers as friends—“I even enjoyed talking with [Lawrence] about parenting.”

To pause at this notion of authors as friends, is not the gong of self-congratulation struck rather too strongly in Booth’s account of the transaction between great novelists and readers like himself?

To dwell with you is to share the improvements you have managed to make in your “self” by perfecting your narrative world. You lead me to practice ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more fully generous than I am likely to meet anywhere else in the world. You correct my faults, rebuke my insensitivities. You mold me into patterns of longing and fulfillment that make my ordinary dreams seem petty and absurd. You finally show me what life can be, not just to a coterie, a saved and saving remnant looking down on the fools, slobs, and knaves, but to anyone who is willing to earn the title of equal and true friend.

This is all very prettily put, and it manages to suggest that Booth’s reading of novels has made him a better man by far than Gunga Din. But I am reasonably sure that this is not, in fact, the case. No doubt he has read a great many novels, but I do not think doing so has necessarily turned him into a wise man, else how could he have written so vanity-ridden and swollen a book? I too have read a great many novels, but my guess is that Booth, for one, will not think they have made me wise, else how could I have written the last few paragraphs of this essay?

Booth appears to believe that in reading “ethically” we take the best each novelist has to offer, and that the sum of all this plays in our minds like some grand chorus, ultimately affecting our characters for the better. I prefer the more modest assessment set out by Robert Louis Stevenson in an essay entitled “Books Which Have Influenced Me”:

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma which he must afterward discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.

This is far from the last word on the subject of what novels accomplish for those who read them regularly, but it is an excellent first word. Stevenson, who was a valued friend of Henry James, was, in James’s view, one of the few practitioners of their shared craft who thought long and carefully about the assumptions behind the writing and the reading of fiction. Henry James was himself all but obsessed with such matters. For James, fiction was an authentic and, for him, the only real way of knowing. While he wrote yards and yards on the art of fiction—his own and that of his fellow novelists—no one ever formulated the essence of James’s criticism and fiction better than TS. Eliot, who, in a single jaunty sentence, wrote: “He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” That splendid dictum would not have been misplaced on Henry James’s tombstone.

Yet what does it mean? We can take it on faith that it does not mean that James could not comprehend ideas. Eliot refers to James’s “mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas.” I am not sure about the “baffling,” but it is clear that to James, who could assuredly bounce the “isms” around with the best of them, the lifelong practice of writing novels had taught him that ideas were not where the important truths lay. There was a truth above ideas, an elusive, difficult to pin down, often inexpressible truth, but it was for James the only truth worth caring about—it was the truth of the novelist.

One does not begin reading novels with this kind of truth in view, any more than, when young, one marries a woman because she seems likely to make an excellent grandmother. When young, one reads novels in large part for information about the world. Much of what I know about the world of East European Jewry—of my own antecedents—I first learned from Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, Isaac Babel, the brothers Singer. Even not very good novels can supply useful information. I recently read Alison Lurie’s The Truth about Lorin Jones, which I thought pretty thin stuff, but I did take away from it what seemed to me a persuasive portrait of feminism in present-day Manhattan, the kind of milieu in which one slips in and out of lesbianism as much through the force of the ideas in the atmosphere as through true feeling. The stories of Bobbie Ann Mason fill me in on a world from which I am far removed and which seems to me otherwise undescribed outside fiction: the world of the middle-Southern, unrooted, quasi-educated young who have grown up knowing chiefly the culture of the Pizza Hut, K-Mart, and community college, or what one thinks of as franchise culture. Except in squibs of journalism, generally journalism that prides itself on making use of fictional techniques, one cannot get this kind of news about contemporary American life anywhere outside fiction.

But news of this kind, very good to have for those of us who fancy ourselves students of our own and other societies, is only a charming if not necessarily valuable dividend that fiction pays out to its readers—and not, in my view, the principal reason for reading it. There are also the pleasures of plot, regrettably abandoned in much ostensibly serious fiction by writers more interested in working out their obsessions, intellectual conceptions, and relentless virtuosity, but pleasures that many serious readers return to 19th-century novels to recapture. Then, too, novels, along with history and biography, provide a fine laboratory in which to study character and thus attempt to make some small progress in that deepest of all deep subjects, human nature. H.L. Mencken once said that, when all the theorizing was done, it was chiefly a novelist’s ability to create interesting characters that gave him any claim to our attention. Does the contemplation of character in fiction come under the rubric of pleasure or instruction? Or is such a bifurcation beside the point in great literature, where instruction is inseparable from pleasure and pleasure from instruction?

In his recent Sketches from a Life, a selection of entries from his diaries, George F. Kennan writes that many Americans “have engaged my admiration, along with a considerable number who have engaged the opposite.” Then, half-apologetically, he adds that “to depict them individually is the task of the novelist,” whereas he himself has gone through life as a “traveler moving through regions where he has no personal acquaintances at all and where he sees, for the most part, only masses of anonymous figures with whom he has no possibility of interacting.” Here we come, I believe, to the nub of the matter. The novelist deals in individual cases, and leaves the generalizations to the literary critics, sociologists, psychologists, journalists, and other fellows passing through town.

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To create a concept, said Ortega y Gasset, is to leave reality behind—not all of it, to be sure, but often the most interesting part. The world today is perhaps more concept-ridden than it has been at any other time, owing to the spread of rather mediocre higher education and the pervasiveness of the mass media. In contemporary politics, in social science, even in science, there appears to be no life beneath that of the theory, the concept. The study of literature was once an antidote to life lived at the level of theory and concept. Today, in universities, literary study is itself concept-plagued. “The increase of theories and discourse,” writes Saul Bellow in The Dean’s December, is “itself a cause of new strange forms of blindness.”

One of the usually unacknowledged but crucial tasks of the novelist, or so it has always seemed to me, is to demonstrate how reality almost always eludes too firmly drawn ideas. “The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity,” Milan Kundera has noted. “The novelist says to the reader: things are not as simple as you think.” The novelist does this, when he is working well, by persuasively establishing that life is more surprising, bizarre, complex, and fascinating than any shibboleth, concept, or theory used to explain it. In that most famous of first sentences, Tolstoy began Anna Karenina by writing, “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Forgive my impertinence, but my own literary education leads me to believe that this splendid sentence is probably only half-true. I have learned from novels that every happy family, too, is happy in its own way.

To be educated by novels, then, is to be educated into a strong taste for the sheer variousness of life—Tolstoy himself said that the artist’s purpose is “to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations”—and at the same time into a counterbalancing distaste for not only the easy but all generalization. To be educated by novels is to believe that human actions are best understood through individual cases, and to believe, further, that every individual case is itself immensely complex—for, as Valéry says, “a man is more complicated than his thoughts.” “How astonishing reality was!” exclaims a character in Italo Svevo’s novel As a Man Grows Older, and anyone educated by novels is likely to agree.

If the novel is finally obdurate before the best intellectual efforts to explain life—it is not for nothing that most novelists are anti-Freudians—it does, of course, yield lessons of its own, or at least the best novels do. From Dickens one learns the importance of friendship, loyalty, and kindness; from Conrad, the central truth of every man or woman’s solitude in the world; from Willa Cather, the dignity that patient suffering can bring; from Tolstoy, the divinity that the most ordinary moments can possess—kissing a child goodnight, working in a field, greeting a son returned home from war; from James, as he puts it in The Princess Casamassima, that “the figures on the chessboard [are] still the passions and jealousies and superstitions and stupidities of man. . . .”

These are neither explanations nor, really, revelations, but then, in the words of Borges, “this imminence of revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.” Knowledge of the kind conveyed in novels may not, in any conventional sense, be useful. All that there is to recommend it is that it feels true, which, for someone educated by novels, is all the recommendation required.

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¹ Simon & Schuster, 250 pp., $18.95.

² University of California Press, 580 pp., $29.95.