A Novel for Dummies

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The New York Sun

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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