A Novel for Dummies
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Randall Jarrell once joked that most critics would no sooner ask a creative writer to explain writing than they would ask a pig to judge a bacon-cooking contest. The problem, as Jane Smiley shows in “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel” (Alfred A. Knopf, 560 pages, $26.95), is not that the writer doesn’t know enough about her art, but that she knows too much. As the author of 11 novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres,” Ms. Smiley lives and breathes the medium of fiction. But in this ambitious treatise, the insights she has to offer are not organized in a way that is useful to the student, and her critical arguments are not pursued deeply enough to stimulate the experienced reader. The book remains an appealing heap.
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