Backstory

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/smiley100/, 10/13/2010

In 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel  Jane Smiley presents a reading list of 100 books.  She argues that each text represents an important achievement in the development of the novel as an art form. 

This isn't a "best books" list because novels are too delicious--and creative influences are too fluid--for boring arguments about The Canon.   It's notable that Smiley approaches reading from the perspective of an author.  Indeed, Smiley seems to think that literary criticism is arid and beside the point of novels in the first place.

 For Smiley, the act of reading consists of building up emotionally charged images in one’s mind.  The special joy found in literature is the movement of images into and out of words.  She writes, “Both writer and reader experience the same basic pleasure—something in one form in the mind takes another form on the page, something in one form on the pages takes another form in the mind.  This is the essential pleasure of literature, ideas going into and out of words over and over, any time the reader opens a book or the author takes up a pen.”* 

So, novels exist only inside a reader's or writer's mind.  The book as a physical object is merely printed words on a page.  Fiction may be correctly read and enjoyed at many different levels because the reader owns the experience of the novel.  Smiley can dismiss literary analysis because it stands apart from the interaction between the writer and the reader.

Smiley’s pragmatism feels genuinely liberating because it means I can continue to grow as a reader throughout my lifetime.  I read Proust one year and decide that the narrator's narcissism is literally unbearable.  Later, I come back to the novel with greater tolerance and empathy

13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is a reading journal.  Smiley's tone is generous, and she is certainly writing within the grand American tradition of self-help.  I think reading 100 novels will change my life.  To serve the larger aim of understanding the development of the novel, I'm willing to plow through books I don't like.  Smiley politely characterizes dull novels as "uncongenial works."  Fair enough.  This allows me to think through what aspects of a novel I don't like and why.  I will, however, make substitutions to The List.  Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gaitskill, and Jane Smiley herself are important American authors who belong on any representative list.

Carefully reading 100 books took Smiley 3 years.  I write this beginning post in fall 2010.  Let's see if I can match Smiley's achievement!

 *Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p.84.