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

This chapter explores the best way to analyze and understand a character in a book. Beginner writers and readers tend to focus on how a character looks, dresses, or even thinks, but what matters most is what the character desires. Great novelists do not spell out this desire up front but instead post signs, symbols, and objects that signal the desire. It is up to readers to observe the signs and decode the desire propelling a character. For instance, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), one of the most enduring images is the green light flashing at the end of heroine Daisy Buchanan’s dock. Gatsby often watches this light play over the water; the light represents Gatsby’s deep and hopeless desire for the American dream. Foster terms the takeaway from this example “the Law of Character Clarity” (173), meaning the author’s use of a tangible object to signal a character’s driving desire.

Foster argues that the most compelling characters have deep—and unfulfilled—desires. For this reason, saints do not make good heroes; even novels like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) focus on the period before the protagonist finds enlightenment. The struggle for peace is always more interesting than peace itself. Novelists like Faulkner knew the fascination that flawed characters hold for readers, which is why he packed his books, like As I Lay Dying (1930), with figures who have bizarre longings. Jewel, the younger son in the plot, longs to own a spotted horse, while Anse, the patriarch of the family, expresses his wish for a new set of teeth even as his wife lies dying. In both cases, the desire for an object illustrates something significant about the characters’ hidden motivations and thus about the characters themselves.

In this chapter, Foster gives a brief overview of the metafictional novel, arguing that metafiction is an age-old genre, and that even the most realistic novel is a made-up construct with metafictional aspects. While the term metafiction was coined by critic William H. Gass in 1970 to describe fiction about fiction, or fiction that acknowledges its made-up aspects, metafictional works have existed since the Bocaccio’s 14th-century story collection The Decameron. A narrator may not be breaking the fourth wall to announce that The Decameron is a construct, but its story-within-a-story structure makes its artifice apparent. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), written deliberately as a parody of the heroic epic, is a metafictional novel, as is Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), which focuses on puns and wordplay to draw readers’ attention to the novel’s composition. In John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), the narrator is more emphatic about the artifice of the work, declaring mid-novel that “the story I am telling is all imagination” (183).

Since the earliest novels were self-reflexive, it may seem strange that metafiction appears experimental to some readers. However, Foster argues that readers’ discomfort arises from the fact that a declaration of artifice keeps them from immersing themselves in a book. Understandably, readers want a narrative voice that briefly makes them believe that the illusion of fiction is real. Regardless of the preference of a reader or writer, all fiction is in a sense metafictional because it draws from previous literary sources and forms and the awareness that it is made-up, creative play. Instead of confronting by the made-up aspects of writing, readers can take them as an invitation from the writer to be equally playful. Fiction about fiction can thus teach readers about their own psychology and creative impulses.

Continuing with the metafictional aspect of novels, Foster delves into literary references and allusions. He argues that all novels draw on preexisting sources to an extent, whether literary forms, previous novels, folk stories, popular myths, news items, or other sources. A novel’s allusion to other sources emphasizes its metafictional aspect: For example, if a novel reminds a reader of a play by Shakespeare, the novel is obviously as made-up as the play itself. However, this does not imply that all novels are derivative; rather it shows that engaging with previous writing as well as history and culture is part of a writer’s personal experience and insights. It is from such experience and insights that a novel grows. For instance, the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek (1946) is based on the Greek god Dionysus. While the book contains several references to sources in Greek mythology, the references are part of the reality of Kazantzakis, who was a philosophy scholar and a translator of classics.

Other novels, like novels of social realism, may not contain literary allusions but paradoxically still draw attention to their fictional aspect by engaging with a social milieu. Since they critique the milieu, it is obvious that they are observing the milieu and therefore distanced from it by artifice. Still other novelists draw on more private passions, like their experiences and feelings, as in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Regardless of a narrative’s source or sources, the writer takes a particular experience and turns it universal for readers; their role is to locate the universal in the specific and parse out the emotional truth behind the lies of fiction.

Foster suggests a new way of reading that empowers students to create additional meaning in a novel. Unlike the conventional method that emphasizes the visuals of words, he asks readers to focus on the audible echoes within the novel. The sound of the novel’s sentences and passages not only open up a fresh way of experiencing it, but they also link with similar sounds in past works and various art forms. To illustrate his point, Foster presents the analogous situation of watching the film Pirates of the Caribbean (2003). The movie’s visuals locate it in a roughly 18th-century milieu, but the focus on dry sand and the echoes of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack soon remind viewers of western classics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Viewers can then start to make connections between the characters of the Pirates movies and western archetypes like the good cowboy and the double-crosser. Thus, by focusing on what Foster calls the “inner ear”—or an ear for reverberations from other texts and art forms—viewers can enjoy the Pirates movies in a new way.

These reverberations can also be explained by formal terms such as intertextuality and dialogism, coined by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, to describe how texts are always in conversation with each other. For instance, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, for instance, is in conversation with Jane Austen’s works, particularly Pride and Prejudice. Readers can discover all these connections not just by closely reading novels but also by listening “for the sounds that lie just behind the main melody” (225).

In this chapter, Foster explores the novel’s ability to make readers understand any character, no matter how removed the character is from their experience. Three novels in the late 20th century emphasized this ability of the novel with a “boom,” laying to rest dire predictions about the fate of the genre. The novels were The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), both by John Fowles, and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Most readers of the three novels were likely not (respectively) English schoolteachers on a Greek island having mystery encounters with a mastermind, Victorian gentlemen with existential dilemmas, or colonels in a fictional South American nation (and never would be). Nevertheless, the protagonists and characters of these novels proved immensely popular.

Foster quotes these examples to show how the Postmodern novel reinvented itself by finding the familiar in the alien. Whether Harry Potter in J. K. Rowling’s series or Frodo in The Lord of the Rings series, many characters exist in a magical world, yet they are real to readers because they represent the underdog, the outsider, and the novice. Harry’s parents are dead, and he knows nothing about being a wizard, while Frodo is assigned a destiny he never desired. Although the premise of the social 19th-century novel was that readers would only involve themselves with characters that were familiar, the Postmodern fantasy novel has shown that readers want to be transported as much as they want to be involved.

Foster poses the question of whether ideas make a novel or if story, plot, and character are enough. To answer the question, he uses the example of Geore Orwell, “the kingpin of ideas-oriented fiction” (241). Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) are novels that deal with huge ideas like the dark side of communism and the threat of totalitarianism, yet it is not the ideas that make the books good. Orwell’s novels are good because the plot, narrative, and language keep them compelling. Foster coins “the Law of Fictional Ideation” (242) to describe how writers should go about binging their big-idea novels to life. First, they must learn how to write because the greatest ideas languish without a good story.

Often, big-idea novels come from historically marginalized groups, such as women. Some of the greatest idea novels of the late 20th century were written by authors like Margaret Atwood and explore the meaning of being a woman in a hostile society. Postcolonial authors use stories to examine ideas like the Postcolonial subject and the impacts of imperialism. However, regardless of the writer, the greatest idea that makes their work good is exploring what it means to be human. In this sense, the novel itself is the closest thing to philosophy, guiding readers in understanding the human condition.