“I can’t go as far as Barthes in killing off the author, but I’m with him on the importance of the reader. We are the ones, after all, who exist long after the author (the real, physical being) is in the grave, choosing to read the book, deciding if it still has meaning, deciding what it means for us, feeling sympathy or contempt or amusement for its people and their problems.”

These lines illustrate Foster’s central idea that reading is a creative act, one that gives novels meaning. He draws on Postmodern literary theory to postulate that readers give a text meaning and life.

“Terms are often butter knives where surgical precision is demanded.”

An example of Foster’s witty narrative style, this pithy statement illustrates a paradox: Terms are supposed to provide definition but often end up being vague. Foster applies this statement to how people use the catch-all term “romance” to refer to novels as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851).

“At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, plowing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to Ali Ibn Haj’ Fatoudi, emir of Ludamar.”

To illustrate the power of an impactful opening line, Foster quotes the first lines of Water Music (1981) by T. C. Boyle. Foster notes how readers immediately want to keep reading to find out why Mungo was displaying his bare buttocks to the Emir.

“Quick, what do these have in common: Middle-earth, Macondo, West Egg, Yoknapatawpha County, San Narcisso, and Narnia? They’re places you (and I) have never lived, and never will. They’re not fit for human habitation […] Not Joyce’s Dublin nor Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown nor Carlos Fuentes’s Mexico City…they’re great places for fiction to take us…they are, however, not the real deal.”

Throughout the text, Foster emphasizes that no matter how realistic it may appear, a novel and all its elements are fictional constructs. This applies to settings as well, from those that are clearly fictional, like Narnia, to real-world settings in a novel, such as Joyce’s Dublin. Foster’s point in emphasizing the artifice of places is that it is not their being unreal or real that makes them authentic but their believability in the context of the novel in which they exist.

“What word can possibly tell you all by itself that the narrator is unreliable? A very short, tall, skinny word. Here’s the Law of Narrative Unreliability: Stop believing the narrator when you see the word ‘I.’ Yes, even if it’s the first word in the novel. He’s toast. Given the game away.”

These lines are an example of Foster’s engaging narrative style, which often uses puns, riddles, and literary devices to illustrate theoretical concepts. Here, Foster uses a riddle—“a very short, tall, skinny word”—to describe “I,” or the first-person narrator.

“Narrators are like cats. They may talk about other people, but the world is mostly about them.”

Another instance of how Foster uses figurative language to enliven a point, this simile likens a cat to a narrator in a novel. The idea is that no matter what pose they may strike, all narrators are primarily concerned with themselves. Interestingly, Foster applies the truism to omniscient third-person narrators too, since they operate from a place of know-it-all smugness.

“There’s a reason Hemingway so rarely resorts to colons and semicolons: Faulkner took them all.”

Foster uses humor and literary allusion to show how novelists writing in the same time period can be vastly different. Ernest Hemingway’s minimally punctuated, short sentences sharply contrast Faulkner’s long, curling sentences, which contain multiple clauses.

“What a narrator says and how he says it changes the story being told. Can you imagine Huckleberry Finn without Huck telling it? Might as well ask if you can imagine the book without him in it. Or Pride and Prejudice without that arch, amused narrative intelligence. Austen could have told that book with a straight face, no smirk, but I believe we won’t be still talking about it.”

Throughout the text, Foster notes the importance of choices that create the manner in which a novel is narrated. This manner or voice is a make-or-break element beyond plot, as he indicates through the examples of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813).

“Because characters aren’t built like pick-up trucks—chassis, engine, transmission, seats, body, skin, windows. They’re sketched, which is why many of them are pretty sketchy. Moreover, they aren’t narrated in huge detail or analyzed by the narrator […] Analysis of those deeds and words falls to another party entirely. That would be us.”

This passage contains an example of Foster’s use of a verbal pun, playfully equating a character being “sketched” or evoked with a sketchy or shifty character. In addition, the passage describes the process of the character sketch. The sketch is not an assembly line or a catalogue but a collection of suggestive words and actions that interest readers. Readers interpret the sketch. Foster indicates that a character that is too detailed may not be appealing because readers may think nothing is left to discover.

“Dickens prefers titles for his chapters. So do I. Titles give you something to work with from the start.”

Though Foster lauds the inventiveness of a flowing narrative with few stops, like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), he admits that he is partial to chapters with titles. Titled chapters, such as Foster’s own—“A Still, Small Voice (or, a Great, Galumphing One)”—can introduce a topic, theme, motif, or suggestion in an interesting way. Thus, titled chapters show how structure can benefit both the narrative and readers.

“Most of all, readers. Chapters provide us with breaks in the reading. Hey, never discount the dumb stuff. Even when we read straight through huge chunks, those breaks provide moments to consider the implications of what we’ve just read, to see how things are fitting together.”

This passage exemplifies Foster’s accessible, informal writing style, meant to mimic a friendly chat between teacher and pupil. Thus, he uses an everyday, irreverent sentence to illustrate his larger point in the passage: Chapters are useful because of their obvious value in giving readers a break.

“So how do we get from there to a pattern of experience that can stand for the whole of postcolonial Latin America? Ah, our paradox again. The solution, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Foster alludes to a passage in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar (1599) to explain why a single story can stand for the experience of a people. In the play, Cassius tells Brutus that the reason for their helplessness is the destiny (stars), which has made them underlings. Addressing readers as “dear Brutus,” Foster continues the pun to state that the answer to his question lies not in a predestined truth but in readers’ use of particular stories to arrive at universal truths.

“Every character has his telos—Aristotle’s term for the necessary endpoint in a goal-oriented, even compulsive, process—not the place he actually winds up but the thing towards which he’s driven, his ultimate goal. Our job is to find it.”

Foster pays particular attention to characters in his text, since they are the element that many readers of novels are most invested in. Using the ancient Greek word telos, which means end goal or purpose, Foster shows that it is the driving desire that makes a character tick. If readers can find a character’s telos, they can understand them and, more importantly, identify with them, no matter how unsympathetic or sympathetic the character is.

“This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does.”

Foster quotes from The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) to show why novelist John Fowles is considered a pathbreaker in making metafiction cool again. In this passage, the narrator breaks the illusion of reality he maintained for 12 chapters, stepping out of the frame to address readers directly. Not only is the direct address subversive, but the narrator freely admits that his story is imaginary and that the novelist who created him is as clueless as any character.

“One response I hear in class to any self-conscious novel is that it’s a stunt, an artificial posturing. My students are right. It is a stunt. Well, guess what? So is the novel that ignores all those other writers in the room. To pretend innocence or lack of self-awareness is exactly that: pretense.”

These lines make the important point that even the most natural performance is a performance, perhaps more so than others because it needs to hide its artifice to a greater degree. While readers may find a novel that alludes to other novels gimmicky, Foster reminds them that a novel that pretends that other books do not exist is also a trick. The most realistic self-contained novel is as artificial as an experimental, self-referential fiction.

“Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over…we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.”

To unpack a novel’s unique appeal, Foster compares the experience of reading it with watching a film or a series. He notes that movies show the audience what characters say, do, and even feel, but because of the limitations of the medium, the audience cannot inhabit those characters. Reading, conversely, is a more private and involved experience, allowing readers to imagine and interpret the characters. It is clear from this passage that Foster considers reading a more enriching activity than watching content, since it leaves its audience with keener insights about human nature.

“What is Frodo Baggins if not a representative of the little guy?…Here is a book, three books really, with no shortage of heroes, and none of them is the focal character. Why not Gandalf the Gray, the wizard with wisdom?…Why, especially not Aragorn, the once and future king? He seems custom-made for the part. He even has a love interest, unlike Frodo.”

Foster often alludes to diverse genres of fiction to make his text more relatable. Here, he uses J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy as an example to explain why the novel favors underdogs. Foster notes that Frodo is the main character of the books precisely because he is conventionally nonheroic; through him, readers imagine how they too can become unconventional protagonists. In addition, this passage is filled with humor: Foster jokes that even Aragorn, one of the few characters in the book who has a love interest and has lived as royalty, does not get the title of its lead.

“It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist. No one I know…wants to be Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their world, even while reviling their personalities. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. […] Sympathy is out of the question. What the novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously gives us reason to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps, certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then, there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main character.”

While characters like Frodo have an everyman, underdog appeal, Foster notes that not all memorable characters need to be identifiable. Readers may find Humbert or Heathcliff fascinating, but no one really wants to be these characters. Instead, these characters are appealing because they allow readers to observe the extremes of human behavior from a safe, manageable distance. In addition, Foster emphasizes that readers make a trade-off with a novel when spending time with its characters: Readers need to be rewarded for putting up with unpleasant figures. In the case of Humbert, the reward is his brilliance with words.

“Right there is the genius of the novel form. It is the perfect medium for capturing individual existence, and in turn to be a near-perfect medium for capturing the experience of the group. The life of the ordinary person—right there is the big idea, the first one the novel ever had.”

Foster’s guide uses both the novel’s structural elements and its sociohistorical context to examine its appeal. He shows readers how the novel endures because its hero is the ordinary person, unlike epic poetry and lyrics, which feature the elite classes and divinity.

“I can’t speak for you, but my ancestors would show up in Shakespeare, if at all, as the grave diggers and comic servants, the entirely expendable class, whose stage time is counted in seconds.”

Using Shakespeare’s plays as an example, Foster analyzes how the middle and lower classes were nearly absent from the stage until a few generations ago. Most formal literature was once about the elites; ordinary characters existed only as background props or comic relief. The novel allowed people from more modest backgrounds to come to the forefront of a narrative.

“Remember when novels used to run front to back, straight through, in order from A to Zed? […] When only Burma-Shave signs had gaps in between? Man, are you old. My advice? Get over it. Mr. Dickens has left the building.”

These lines exemplify Foster’s narrative persona: the accessible, cool professor. Knowing that many of his readers (particularly college students) may be younger than him, he jokes that their conventional expectations of the novel are too old. He suggests the students open their mind, like he has done, and accept that Charles Dickens from the 19th century has long left the building and that the novel does not need to run serially from A to Z.

“Every novel is an act of violence, a wrestling match with the historical and social forces of its own time.”

Foster uses the unusual simile of a wrestling match to describe a novel, casting its historical context as its opponent. The simile suggests that a novel can never evade its context; instead, a novelist must grapple with the context to create a story that is both individual and of its time.

“In the real world, in fact, there is only one ending, and it’s not particularly tidy.”

Foster alludes to the metaphor of death—the only ending in the real world—to illustrate both the need for a happy ending in fiction and the desire to subvert that need. Victorian novels strove for tidy resolutions so that narratives could give people the closure that life denies. However, in contemporary times, people are more comfortable with life’s inherent ambiguity; thus, novels tend to resist “tidy” endings.