How to read a novel

I

Most of the time, reading seems the mere matter of flicking my eyes across the page. It is something physical and rudimentary. It might as well be walking – when I cross the road, I don't wonder at the piston-like action of my legs, so miraculously calibrated by millions of years of evolution, that, even though I am clumsy, it is a shock on the rare occasions I have tripped. I assume I know how to read a book. After all, I've been doing it since I was six.

But I thought about the nature of reading more often when I was six, largely because I found it difficult. That’s not to say I had any profound thoughts. I simply thought about it. Or ‘wondered’ is perhaps more accurate – wondered about reading the way children wonder about where wind comes from and what happens after we die. A vague, naked wondering. An approach of mystery as mystery. 

Reading, however, is a mystery. 

There was a long period in which no written form of language existed, until someone in Mesopotamia, nearly 6000 years ago, invented something called ‘cuneiform.’ There were letters where there had been none.

Until then, all human knowledge depended on oral transmission, and therefore, on the memories of living people. If everyone who knew how to light a fire or build a dam was suddenly killed, then that knowledge was lost – some descendant would’ve had to discover those things independently. It is difficult to comprehend just how insecure this system of knowledge was. Undoubtedly, huge volumes of knowledge were lost from generation to generation. Everything that was known was contained in the minds of approximately 45 million people – less than the current population of Britain or South Africa – who could be struck down at 25 by rotting teeth.

But once letters were invented, they moved from clay tablets to papyrus to vellum to paper to screen, and yet, simple written text is still more advanced than even the most sophisticated virtual reality technology. A novel is still the only device that can dictate its user’s interior monologue. 

And yet, how does it work – this supposedly simple skill of reading which millions of children learn anew every single year? We stare at a screen or a page and a collection of dark curves and slashes causes us to see anything that it is possible for an author to have imagined. 

As Virginia Woolf puts it in 'How Should One Read a Book':

‘For though reading seems so simple – a mere matter of knowing the alphabet – it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.’ 

Difficult – yes, certainly.

I haven't succeeded in reading much lately. I have struggled to focus and been easily distracted and there is no special reason for this. But this difficulty has reminded me of when I first learnt to read, and the process of sounding out each foreign word. 

The sense that I've kept having, the same as back then – when I've looked out the window or fiddled with the tassel of a cushion – is of doing something wrong. That there is some greater meaning which is evading me. Of course my difficulty with reading now and reading then is different. Now it is more a matter of immersion and focus than simple comprehension. But the most important difference is that a child learning to read is fixated on words – on how they sound, and how the sounds of the letters add up to that word sound – where as an adult who is trying seriously to read a novel is aiming to reach a place where the words disappear. That the medium through which the other world is being conveyed, no longer becomes an impediment between here and there. 

But in both cases, my sense of wrongdoing is spatial. That there’s a place I’m meant to be getting to where my attention flows freely through the language. That I am no longer performing the individual footsteps of a hike, but have stepped into a river, down which I am being carried.

This 'wrong' is obviously not physical. Once we have learnt to read, it seems almost impossible to move our eyes incorrectly unless we are tired. Whatever wrong exists, is about what I am doing (or not doing) with my mind.  

II

Fiction is an act of translation. This is true of all language, all symbols (to the extent that we consider a representation to be a translation) but the effect is cumulatively greater with fiction. The potential for gaps – between signifier and signified – to arise over an entire novel, compared to a single label-object relationship, is exponentially greater.

When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he wasn’t trying to convey the words ‘dragon,’ ‘cave,’ and ‘gold’ to the reader; what he wanted was for the reader to see Smaug’s lair with its mountains of gold and to feel Bilbo’s fear at being caught and incinerated by that particular dragon.

For the reader to see this, the writer needs to have written well. But the reader also has to participate, to make the cognitive effort to imagine what the cave would look like and not just hear the word ‘cave.’ We all know what this feels like when it works, even if we haven’t felt it in a long time – that we are no longer hearing words which, strung together, make a story about Bilbo, but that we have become Bilbo. 

When it does not work, we comprehend the words without imagining the fictional world. The gap between the symbol and symbolised is dragged open – and we are returned to a seat in a classroom, to a blackboard, with the belief that there is a place everyone apart from us, has already gone. That reading novels is for those other people, not for us.

How is that we can routinely enter the cave, rather than remaining on its threshold? 

The starting point is this: books differ and we have to read a book for what it is trying to be. You wouldn't read James Joyce for light entertainment anymore than you'd go to McDonalds for your five-year wedding anniversary. Or as Woolf more eloquently puts it: 

‘From different books we must ask different qualities.’  

The first thing Woolf advises us to do in reading, is to set our expectations. We hold a novel to a different standard than we hold a biography, or a textbook, or a poem. If the book is a memoir and I write, 'I, Blake Shapiro, was born in Antarctica in 1887' it matters to you, the reader, that this is false. As it is a memoir, you expect the basic facts about my life to be told truthfully, though you might forgive a self-deceiving interpretation of those facts, or the possibility of a slip in acuity when I am writing about my early childhood. 

Conversely, if I begin a novel with the same sentence – 'I, Blake Shapiro, was born in Antarctica in 1887' you are not concerned that this is untrue. (Though you might wonder why I have named a character after myself). In fact, you know that the claim is false but you are willing to accept the claim as if it were true. This is thinking as if, is of pivotal importance in storytelling. As Joseph Campbell explains in Primitive Mythologies, the same principle underlies all ritual, all childhood play. To agree to think as if it were true is the basic agreement a reader has to make with a novel in order to read it and have any enjoyment whatsoever. 

But this agreement can be violated by the writer. The reader still requires the veneer of truth in order to accept the untruth. For example, if I told you that I learnt to read when I was six, and I say that the carpet in my grade one classroom was blue and the book we were given had a red plastic cover – you would probably believe me. 

None of those facts are implausible and so they would not spoil the illusion. 

Of course, if I then revealed to you, having presented that story as autobiographical, that the book had a green cover and there was no carpet but a screed floor, you would resent me for it. Or if I claimed I was so good at reading at the age of six (I was quite bad) that I had already made my way through all of Tolstoy and translated War and Peace into ancient Sumerian, you would either have to stop reading, or accept the book as a very different kind of book. 

This is all relatively obvious. But where the question about expectation becomes subtler is within a category of book, especially within the category in novel. What do we expect of different novels? What do we expect of style and pacing and characterisation and interiority and position within, or rejection of, a distinct literary school? Do we expect a novel to have a political stance, a moral one?

The category of 'novel' varies immensely. It doesn't help that most of what we call novels aren't actually novels in the technical sense (as Northrop Frye argues in his essay, 'The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,' there is, as the title would suggest, more than one form of long-form fictional prose, even though we insist on calling every such creature a 'novel.') Notwithstanding, there are as many kinds of novels as there are kinds of people, as the cliché goes. 

So, what is it, after all, that we can expect of a novel?

III

Simply put, we ordinarily expect some sort of pleasure from a novel. 

I don’t only mean reading a pulpy romance on the beach. There are many kinds of reading pleasure — the secrets of consciousness we get from Proust (or whatever it is we get from Proust) are one sort of pleasure, the excitement of a cheap thriller is another kind. As Henry James says, in The Art of Fiction:

‘The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.'

That’s all we usually want — that a novel is somehow interesting and so gives us pleasure. Even so, we might ask, what counts as ‘interesting’? The problem we run into with Woolf’s advice (of asking different things from different books) is that asking requires us to have a pre-formulated idea of the book we are reading. 

Nabokov doesn’t like that. In  'Good Readers and Good Writers' he says:

‘If one begins with a readymade generalisation, one begins at the wrong end and travels far away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoise.’ 

It would obviously be unfair to Woolf to say she is suggesting a ‘readymade generalisation.’ But Nabokov’s is certainly a nice idea: that we should treat a new novel with the respect we might give our small child, allowing them to be exactly what they want, and not transforming them into a medium through which our own failed juvenile fantasies can be vicariously accomplished. Or that we should be like some Platonically ideal judge, never allowing our biases to enter the courtroom. 

Except, just as a judge can’t forget themselves, and as even the best-intentioned parents can’t help wanting certain things for their child, the ideal of ignorance is impossible. 

We cannot help but have preconceived ideas of novels. With ‘classics,’ the reasons are obvious – a generation of schoolmasters have told us what Gatsby’s ‘green light’ means. From the moment we pick up the novel, there is already a novel in our minds – and there is nothing poor Fitzgerald can do about it.

But even if we’ve picked up some obscure Victorian work from a charity store, we will still have some notion of what it is, even if that notion is entirely incorrect. Perhaps we liked the cover of a woman in a frilly dress on a swing, or otherwise we read the blurb, whose intention was not to represent the novel accurately, but to entice us to buy it.

Even if we saw neither, and a friend sent as a coverless digital copy of a book, we would still have certain ideas about why they've sent it to us, and what sort of thing we think our friend is likely to read.

Even if we could approach a novel with a perfect ignorance of that novel, our other ideas – about literature in general, and about what we’ve already read, and what we haven't read – would still corrupt our interpretation. 

This is because so much of our understanding of literature is referential. If we read Ulysses – which, as it is generally argued, uses symbolic correspondences with The Odyssey as its primary structure – without knowing anything about Homer, there’s a lot that we’ll miss. Conversely, if you’re a Homeric scholar and pick up Ulysses from that position, you might think it’s only about Homer, and miss everything else. If you read Therese Raquin having never before touched Emile Zola, but you’ve read what Huysmans has to say about Zola, you will expect a dry and soulless naturalism. 

No matter the author, we will have some idea of our new book, and that idea can mislead us. 

So, how do we resolve this problem? 

Well, since a preconception is invariable, it is first of all better that we admit we have it, rather than to pretend otherwise, and simply put, we should be willing to update our ideas. 

We can treat our expectations the way Umberto Eco thinks we should treat introductions in a doctoral thesis. Our introduction, he says, will change dramatically, perhaps unrecognisably, by the time we are finished writing the thesis. If it remained the same, it would mean we have learnt nothing in the course of three years of research. However, we still need to have one. Why?

He uses the following analogy:

‘Imagine that you have a week to take a 600-mile car trip. Even if you are on vacation, you will not leave your house and indiscriminately begin driving in a random direction. You will make a rough plan. You may decide to take the Milan-Naples highway, with slight detours through Florence, Siena, Arezzo, possibly a longer stop in Rome, and also a visit to Montecassino. If you realize along the way that Siena takes you longer than anticipated, or that it is also worth visiting San Gimignano, you may decide to eliminate Montecassino. Once you arrive in Arezzo, you may have the sudden, irrational, last-minute idea to turn east and visit Urbino, Perugia, Assisi, and Gubbio. This means that—for substantial reasons—you may change your itinerary in the middle of the voyage. But you will modify that itinerary, and not no itinerary.’

This is not so different from what Woolf says. That we should have an expectation, and then we should update it. The most important thing is to find out what kind of a book it is that we are reading, and while this can be difficult, we should remind ourselves that:

‘…each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously tried to trace out a design.’ 

And if we can follow this design, rather than insisting that it conform to our own:

‘…we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the sting.’ 

Except, actually tracing the ‘design’ of a novel, and once we have, figuring out how to replicate it with another novel, is not so easy. 

IV

No matter how smart we are or how closely we read, the fact is that some novels will open themselves up to us, and some will not. The same novels can, and often will, have the opposite effect on different people. There is a high level of subjectivity involved in reading, stemming from the fact that a novel’s images depend upon a reader to imagine them.

But as far as I can tell, the kind of reading we want involves separates kinds of thinking. The early part of reading a novel involves a feeling-out process, whereby you try to catch the style and turn of thought and rhythm of the particular book that you are reading. Rhythm being the most important part.

In this phase, it is best to be as open as possible, and to try to forget as many of our preconceived ideas as we can – we are trying to become acquainted enough with the novel’s ‘mind-style’ that it can enmesh with our mind. Whether this succeeds or not, has a lot to do with how foreign that ‘mind-style’ is of our own – this is something like a body decides whether or not to accept a donated organ. 

Once we catch the rhythm – which, with certain books can take much longer – things become easier. For me, this is when it is possible to commit wholly to imagining the things that the novel describes. I find it takes some effort, especially at first, but that the effort is worth it. If the writer gives us a whole page of landscape description, about dappled shadows caused by the leaves of birch trees and a mountain on the horizon which looks like this-and-that in the particular composition of sun and cloud – then I go slowly and try to imagine each of these elements. 

This is what I am 'supposed' to do but I don’t do it all the time. Something I’ve noticed in my own reading, is how easy it is to drift through entire novels blindly, skipping through scenic description until there’s some sort of action or dialogue. That’s not so different from life, really – a degree of presence is required, and usually the more the better. 

However, once we are imagining everything in detail, without having to remind ourselves to do that, this is where our reading reaches the point of automaticity and becomes highly pleasurable. This stage is not reached in all reading experiences. Some novels will simply not give that to us. Yet, if we are open enough and generous enough with our attention, we should be able to get here more often than not, at least provided that the novel is good. 

If we do reach automaticity, it is possible to remain there for the rest of the novel – provided the author doesn't cockup the landing – and we will probably have a very good time doing that.

But my suspicion is this: Woolf’s and Nabokov’s essays pre-suppose the reaching of this stage, and their advice is only truly applicable to that part of the reading experience onwards.

Both essays ('How Should One Read a Book' and 'Good Readers and Good Writers,' respectively) have the same central principle: that we’re supposed to read a novel as if we were writing it. There is also a similar passage in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay, ‘Inadvertent,’ where he explains that one of his big realisations was that writing and reading are the same thing. 

This advice sounds great, but it is vague, and easy to get hung up on. However, I think the point of the advice is to say that, once we reach the automaticity stage, this is when we begin to ask questions about structure, pacing, diction. The confusing part – and what’s missing in most essays about reading for me – is that these two processes are not simultaneous. They are alternate. 

For me, this looks like a sort of stop and go. That I will read for a while with no aim except immersion, and then every now and again, whenever I have read something I particularly enjoyed or did not enjoy, I will investigate why. Was it because of the closeness of the description or was it just funny dialogue that was driving things – and what was I pulled out by? Why has the writer chosen to give the character an 'anorak' and not a 'parka' or a 'waterproof' or simply a ‘jacket?’ What effect did punctuating the dialogue a certain way have on my impression? For example, standard quotation marks, or perhaps dashes without quotation marks, or neither. Having tried to answer this question, I will jump back into immersion-reading. The feeling is something like driving to a destination, then every now and again looking out the window. 

But this analysis part is frequently overcomplicated. Like Andrew Cowan says in The Art of Writing Fiction, the only questions that are really required are: What worked for me? What didn’t work for me? Why? 

Of course, these questions have more immediate utility if you are reading for the express purpose of getting better at writing. You might wonder, if that is not your purpose, whether you are better just sticking in the automaticity phase, since at first glance – and this is a common complaint of young writers – the analysis seems to be an obstacle to reading pleasure.

Perhaps it is something like drinking a dessert wine, and on the one hand, only tasting that it is sweet, and on the other, being a winemaker and knowing that it is sweet for reasons to do with the muscat grape varietal and how much sun it has received before harvest. 

My opinion is that there is more pleasure to be had in the latter case. I reckon cooks enjoy fine dining more than non-cooks, and musicians enjoy Mozart more than the rest of us plebs. This is because pleasures tend to be composite effects, and being able to identify the relevant sub-components means we have a language with which to engage the experience.

Then again, if the wine's especially good, there's nothing wrong with just drinking it.