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Written by Stephen Schenkenberg Wednesday, 30 November 2005 14:54

There is plenty of fun to be had for the bookworm—pages and pages of writers and books brought together like fish in an aquarium.

Jane Smiley | 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf; 591 pgs; $26.95)

To its Pulitzer Prize–winning author, this well-intentioned, meandering book should be used “like an old trunk full of fabric samples or a box of costume jewelry—it is not to be read through from beginning to end in search of a cohesive argument, but to be rummaged about in, in search of something interesting or striking.” As Smiley admits, there is little cohesion in the hundreds of pages of essays that make up part of the book, nor in the list of, and commentary on, 100 novels she read or reread for this project. There is, however, plenty of fun to be had for the bookworm—pages and pages of writers and books brought together like fish in an aquarium. How much interest you have in the obscure kinds among them (Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker?) will depend in part on your reason for standing in front of the tank.

And there are good reasons: fresh perspectives on classics (she offers reasonable criticisms of Lolita and Gatsby); learning about others’ ideas of the novel (“The author’s job, according to [Virginia] Woolf, is to preserve exceptional moments, not to award them to exceptional people”); or, of course, Smiley’s own ideas (“If I have to pick a single institution that the novel has changed, and whose changes have in turn fundamentally changed the way people live, I would pick marriage”). Like many list-driven books of this kind,13 Ways is a volume I’ll probably enjoy more the longer it’s on my shelf, as I eventually travel or re-travel the paths she’s described taking. For the present, I’ll remember that despite the tough going of much of this book, there exist a few well-articulated and even moving statements of why reading fiction matters. Among them, there’s this: “If the novel has died for men (and some publishers and critics say that men read fewer novels than they used to), then the inner lives of their friends and family members are a degree more closed to them than before. If the novel dies, or never lives, for children and teenagers who spend their time watching TV or playing video games, then they will always be somewhat mystified by others, and by themselves as well.”