63 pages • 2-hour read
How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
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Themes
Readers’ Importance in Creating a Novel’s Meaning
Expanding on the maxim of French literary theorist Roland Barthes that the author is dead, Foster shows that readers—rather than writers—are the real heroes of literature. He argues that a reader’s interpretation of a book gives it meaning. Furthermore, no two interpretations of a book are identical, not even when the same person reads it at different times.
Foster uses various metaphors to convey the idea of readers as creators of meaning: He compares readers to the philosopher Heraclitus, who never stepped in the same river twice, to emphasize that every reading makes readers discover something new about a novel. He also likens the process of reading a book to having a dialogue with not just the novel’s author but all other works to which it connects. These prolific metaphors show that Foster considers reading as important as writing. The footing he gives to reading has a twofold purpose: to establish reading as an original, dynamic act, and to inspire his audience to read novels closely and critically.
To show how reading is a creative and dynamic act, Foster examines a common question that students ask: what an author “meant” when they wrote a particular plotline. Foster shows that it does not matter what the author intended through a character, a motif, or an ending because “Elvis has left the building. It’s not his novel any more. It’s ours. His and mine. His and yours” (285). Since the novel belongs to readers, it is up to them to interpret a character as they see fit. In interpreting the character or the plot, readers create something that even the author may never have imagined or intended. Thus, reading is far from a passive consumer exercise.
Because the act of reading is a form creation as significant as the act of writing, readers have good reason to approach a novel both passionately and playfully. Foster therefore advocates close and involved reading in which readers allow ambiguity to open their minds. Novels that leave readers asking why, or unsure about a character, are great because they encourage curiosity and deep thinking. They also help readers see that literature, like life, may have no tidy endings. Furthermore, since novels contain echoes of or allusions to other novels and works of art, readers can use a novel as a starting point for endless exploration, enriching their minds by engaging with those other works.
The Centrality of Structure in Literature
In a section emphasizing the need for chapters in a novel, Foster notes that structural units matter “in ways both trivial and profound” (99). In a basic sense, chapters provide readers a break, a place to stop for the night; in a profound sense, chapters influence the story the author is telling by helping shape the narrative.
Foster’s observations about chapters are relevant to the larger structure in novels. While an over-reliance on structure may be mistaken for rigid conventionality, novels would not exist without structure, becoming just blocks of text. Foster shows how even the most experimental novels have a structure, which the organic command of the story dictates. James Joyce’s highly experimental Ulysses presents Molly Bloom’s thoughts as a 45-page, breathless monologue without full stops (periods), but the monologue’s structure characterizes Molly for readers by indicating the profusion of her thoughts and feelings and her particular circumstances at the time: the end of an exhausting day. Thus, even its wild structure provides meaning to the novel.
Another way that Foster examines the centrality of structures is through the Victorian novel. This form achieved a relatively uniform format—chapters with strong beginnings and momentous or cliffhanger ends, an omniscient narrator, and a resolution for all characters by the end of the book—not just because of an emphasis on order but because of the market’s needs. The chief way novelists made money was by selling their story to journals, which published the story in installments, much like “soap operas (with less explicit sex)” (7). Like contemporary soap operas, the Victorian novel faced the challenge of continuity. To make characters memorable over several installments, novelists gave them easily identifiable attributes. Just as soap opera episodes or scenes sometimes begin with a recap of previous events, chapters of the Victorian novel quickly brought readers up to speed by reiterating earlier plot points. Thus, in the Victorian novel, structure was born of necessity, a truism that applies to all literary forms.
Structure is important not just as the organizing principle of a literary work but also as a way to make reading easier and enable readers to excavate more meaning from a text. Analyzing structural elements such as setting, chronology, and sentences reveals crucial insights about the text, about writing, and about human nature. As an example, paying attention to word choices in a novel tells readers about how characters relate to each other and the world and often about what the narrator thinks of the characters. Thus, instead of thinking of structure as convention, Foster encourages readers to conceptualize structural elements like themes and style as “portals to meaning, the doors and windows where possibilities establish themselves” (117).
The Enduring Power of the Novel
One of the key themes of Foster’s book is why the novel continues to be the most popular literary form since the 19th century. The novel has periodically been declared “dead,” but the genre continues to resurrect itself and thrive, so much so that it has crowded out other forms of literature. While this change has a lot to do with cultural, technological, and economic developments, Foster shows how the structure and scope of the novel gives it enduring appeal. As its name suggests, the novel explores new possibilities. Foster compares the early days of the novel to the “Wild West: very few rules and a lot of outrageous possibility” (188). Even centuries after its inception, the genre continues to have room for outrageous possibility.
The push of the novel to reinvent itself is evident in the stylistic experiments of many contemporary writers. For example, Tim O’Brien’s novel about the Vietnam war, The Things They Carried (1990) is a series of linked short stories, while Fishing for Amber (1999) by Ciaran Carson is subtitled “A Long Story” and comprises retellings from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Irish fairy lore, and the development of Dutch painting. Other novels adapt conventions from oral storytelling, folk tales, and story cycles, ensuring that the form never stagnates. The second reason for the novel’s enduring appeal is that it accommodates not just the new but the old as well. Experiments with form do not imply that writers have abandoned the traditional Victorian structure. In fact, Foster shows that linear storytelling, cliffhanger chapters, and firm resolutions continue to dominate subgenres such as children’s books, detective fiction, and mysteries. Furthermore, the definition of novel is vast, including works of fantasy like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and realistic literary fiction like In the Forest (2002) by Edna O’Brien.
Foster suggests that novels appeal to readers because they are all variations of the same story: the story of what it means to be human. While early prose narratives centered on the interaction between humans and the divine, the novel prioritizes the human experience, exploring questions such as how to exist in the world, how to live with suffering, and how to love despite betrayal. Foster considers the novel a story about human events, whether “the Napoleonic wars or a trip up an escalator to a mezzanine” (304). The novel places paradoxical human experience in a narrative form, and people turn to the novel because narratives help them better understand the world.
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