How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

The best novels of a century tend to have similar endings that capture the essence of the historical epoch. To prove this point, Foster examines the Victorian and Modernist novel. The greatest Victorian novels usually have endings that offer a clear resolution for most characters. While these endings close the story, their tidiness weakens them, as in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850): In the final pages, David’s troubles melt away, his wife Dora dies, and he remarries Agnes “in a lightning-round courtship” (266). Though Foster loves Dickens, he acknowledges that the novelist’s endings sometimes feel unearned. The too-neat endings reflect the Victorian desire for structure and order, as well the concept of religion dominating Victorian life, with God as a strict taskmaster meting out rewards and punishments. Their endings correspondingly punished evil characters and rewarded good characters through marriage and prosperity.

Ambiguity, a defining feature of contemporary life after World War I, is reflected in postwar novels. The tidy Victorian ending gave way to more open resolutions in Modernist novels, a change that is most apparent in different works of the same novelist. For instance, E. M. Forster’s early novels have conventional romantic endings, but A Passage to India, published in 1925, ends with protagonist Dr. Aziz and his friend Cyril Fielding arguing over whether India and England can ever be allies. The answer to that question is left for readers to decipher. The message that Modernist endings convey is that sometimes life presents no clear answers. The Postmodernist novel (after 1945) took this ambiguity a step further: Literary stylists played with the very concept of an end. For instance, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) ends on an unfinished sentence. Foster clarifies that this open-endedness does not apply to all contemporary novels: Genre works in particular lean toward more decisive endings.

Foster turns his lens to the historical novel, by which he means a novel that tries to capture a decisive moment in the history of a nation, people, or culture. A Victorian example of the historical novel is Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867), in which the novelist’s subject is Russia’s war against Napolean. While now such novels tend to win their writers literary awards—particularly the Nobel in literature—for their ambitious scope and social relevance, in Tolstoy’s time, War and Peace was considered an oddity. In contemporary times, the interplay between the forces of history and the personal is far more common in novels, and the postcolonial novel emerges as a vital player.

Focusing on experiences that have been othered, postcolonial novels find new and urgent ways to narrate that history and in turn, give fresh life to the genre. Leslie Mormon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), for instance, adapts traditional Pueblo storytelling and cyclical, nonlinear chronology to tell the story of World War II veteran Tayo returning to his Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. Tayo’s story plays out as an interconnected cycle incorporating the experiences of his people before his birth, so his individual struggle links to the generational trauma of dislocation and colonization. Novels depicting the experiences of Black Americans likewise capture how history is a living force for their characters, partly because racism continues as part of contemporary American reality. Postcolonial, Black American, and feminist novels thus engage with history in an animated, unprecedented way because history is never past for those whom it attempts to marginalize.

Honing in on the novel as part of the nation-building project, Foster offers readers a challenge: Compare novels from a relatively recently freed nation such as India, Nigeria, or Ireland, to the works of American writers like Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper, who emerged after the US gained independence from England. Foster thinks that readers will find a similarity between the works since all are trying to articulate a new identity, a fresh way of being. Thus, history and the novel are always involved in a complex interplay; this is true even for seemingly ahistorical novels and children’s books. For instance, the Harry Potter books contain several parallels to the rise of Nazism, perhaps because postwar history was a huge influence on their writer.

In this chapter, Foster emphasizes the role of readers in a novel, showing how a novel does not exist till it is read by someone. An author creates the words, but readers give the book meaning and life. The reason that Foster believes that readers’ interpretation is so central to the novel-reading experience is that all novels are ambiguous, regardless of whether the writer intends it. This ambiguity arises both from the fluid nature of language and that of humans themselves. As imprecise creatures, humans mask their desires and contradict themselves. To be true to human nature, a novel must depict ambiguous characters and situations.

This ambiguity implies that a reader must closely interact with a novel to glean its slippery meaning. Readers’ dialogue with a particular book can even change with time. Foster returns to his own response to Dickens’s Great Expectations to illustrate this point. When he first read the novel, he disliked its ending, considering it a complete cop-out: Pip ends up with the ambiguous Estella, naively declaring, “I saw no shadow of parting from her” (293), as if Dickens is trying to force-fit a happy ending between Pip and the woman who seldom treated him well. However, when Foster read the novel a third time, decades later, his attention fell to the qualifier “I saw.” This indicates that the novel does not declare that Pip will always be with Estella but only that he thinks in that moment that their parting is impossible. The gap between the narrator and Pip reveals that the ending is not as pat as Foster first assumed; Dickens leaves room for the interpretation that Pip has more to learn regarding Estella and his own nature. Thus, close reading—or what Foster considers owning the reading experience—is essential to one’s dialogue with a text.

At the beginning of the last chapter, Foster notes, “One story. That’s all there is [and] all there ever will be” (303). His point is that, ultimately, all novels tell the story of what it means to be human. While the earliest literature and stories—epics and poetry—devote their focus to divinity and mythmaking, the novel swaps its central subject, exchanging the divine for the human. Whether a Victorian social realist like Tolstoy or an experimental provocateur like Nicholson Baker, every novelist tells the same story. However, this does not imply that reading one novel is akin to reading them all. In fact, the opposite is true: The more novels one reads, the more one discovers, just like the more one learns about human nature, the more there is to explore. Consequently, novels are stepping stones to each other, or the interconnected “echoes” that Foster examines in the Interlude, “Read With Your Ears.” The path of reading opens doors to other texts, becoming a never-ending journey.