What Good Is Fiction?
At one of my children’s sporting events a few weeks ago, another parent arrived to cheer on our sons’ team carrying a foldout chair in one hand and, in case the game was a blowout, a book in the other. When I asked her what she was reading, she said, “Oh, just a novel.” Her tone implied she was indulging in a guilty pleasure, as if she believed—or assumed I believed—that novels were mere time killers. Not the right kind of reading. But over the course of a few conversations, I learned that she loves fiction. She wrote her college thesis about the great novelist Joseph Conrad. Her home bookshelves sag with great novels she and her husband have enjoyed. But as she explained to me, her response to my question took an almost apologetic tone because people in her professional circles talk only about reading histories, biographies, and self-improvement books. As if those are the only pages where true wisdom resides.
That isn’t a new doubt. The novel has been a suspect genre since becoming popular in Britain during the 18th century. The great lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson warned that novels “are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle” and were therefore capable of corrupting their readers in profound ways. Read too much of the wrong kind of book, and you’ll addle your brain. A recent Wall Street Journal story about the popularity among women of a genre called romantasy—“a mix of fantasy and romance [in which] heroines ride dragons to battle enemies and otherwise navigate magical realms, all while living their best sex lives”—warned that “the books create such unreal expectations about what a relationship should offer that mortal men can’t match up.” The story quotes a therapist who reports having “single clients who have had to take a break from romantasy because it sets up unrealistic ideals of a relationship and how they’ll be treated.” Again, that’s not a new story—it’s a variation of what Miguel de Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott depicted happening to their title characters in Don Quixote (1605, 1616) and Waverley (1814), respectively, and Jane Austen with her heroine in Northanger Abbey (1817).
At its best, the novel reveals profound insights about ourselves and the human condition.
Novels are also capable of sparking broader changes. Consider what Abraham Lincoln supposedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” (The remark, as wonderful as it is, seems to have been based more on family lore than historical fact.) On the other hand, Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on another novelist: Walter Scott. Although he was Scottish, “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” Just as the story about Lincoln’s remark is apocryphal, so Twain’s claim is hyperbolic; yet they both get at the important truth of fiction’s power: It can shape how we think, how we behave, what we believe; this power can accumulate and form a nation’s sense of itself, its social and political directions.
At its best, the novel reveals profound insights about ourselves and the human condition. The great 20th-century literary critic Lionel Trilling conveys this idea when he calls the novel “the most effective agent of the moral imagination”:
“Its greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it. It taught us . . . the extent of human variety and the value of this variety.”
Or, as the columnist Peggy Noonan put it more recently,
“Reading deepens. . . . You have to follow the plot, imagine what the ballroom looks like, figure the motivations of the characters—I understand what Gatsby wants! All this makes your brain and soul develop the habit of generous and imaginative thinking.”
Another way of putting it is that reading develops the sympathetic imagination.
Not that readers pick up novels with the intention of developing their sympathetic powers. We read fiction to be entertained and delighted, surprised by language, intrigued by characters, gripped by plots. What’s more, emphasizing fiction’s power to develop the sympathetic imagination may give the impression that novels are necessarily a squishy sort of form that excuses bad behavior. Not so—more great fiction than most people realize encourages what Noonan calls “imaginative thinking” about principles that are distinctively conservative. Conservative readers may already be familiar with a handful of such works—novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, and Tom Wolfe, for example, or J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But that’s just scratching the surface.
We read fiction to be entertained and delighted, surprised by language, intrigued by characters, gripped by plots.
Consider the Victorian novelist George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), remarkable in part because it is a Zionist novel written by a gentile more than 20 years before the first Zionist Congress. The title character is a selfless young man who feels aimless and unfulfilled. That begins to change when, after rescuing a girl from drowning, his search for her family leads him to discover his own Jewish background. Daniel seizes on this as the focal point for his sympathetic efforts: “The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national center, such as the English have.”
Daniel’s sense of purpose hits on a truth about human nature: Until we find a focus for our ambitions and efforts, we’re likely to be restless and unfulfilled. But beyond that, the novel also makes a compelling case for the State of Israel. Daniel is inspired to champion the Zionist cause in part by a Jewish acquaintance who declares, “Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West.” The nation-states of Europe are the template for this polity, but the United States of America is also an inspiration: “Only two centuries since a vessel carried over the ocean the beginning of the great North American nation. The people grew like meeting waters—they were various in habit and sect—there came a time . . . when they needed a polity,” and so turned to “memories of Europe, corrected by the vision of a better.” This is a marvelous account of the American founding, as well as a hopeful consideration of a state for Jews. If a continental nation can grow from such disparate habits and sects, Eliot’s protagonist imagines, surely a Jewish state is feasible.
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) considers national identity from a distinctively American perspective. This beautiful novel reminds us of the power of the American Dream: the ability to rise up from one’s station, to find happiness and prosperity through hard work and perseverance. In it, a man named Jim Burden recalls his childhood in the prairie town of Black Hawk, Nebraska—to which he moved from Virginia as a child after his parents died—and in particular the title character, an immigrant girl who suffers great hardship when her family emigrates. My Ántonia does not ignore the problems immigrants experience. Yet Ántonia and many of her fellow immigrants find prosperity and happiness in America—some through successful careers, and Ántonia herself in a large, raucous family and life on a farm. The novel is not only about the immigrant experience: Burden, too, finds prosperity and is himself a fulfillment of America’s promise. Although his personal life is not as satisfying as Ántonia’s, he has become a successful lawyer for a major railroad company. We learn that “he loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development.” He and Ántonia are powerful expressions of the promise and opportunities America offers men and women, even as Cather acknowledges the difficulties and challenges.
The stories that Eliot and Cather tell emphasize the promise awaiting their characters; the work of V. S. Naipaul reminds us that even when such promises are realized, they remain fragile. Barack Obama once said of Naipaul, “I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.” Perhaps a reason for Obama’s discomfort is that, as the critic and essayist Joseph Epstein put it, “Civilization, for Naipaul, is a fragile thing, always in peril.” Naipaul makes that fragility palpable in his 1979 work A Bend in the River. The novel’s narrator, a man of Indian and Muslim descent named Salim, leaves his family’s home on the eastern coast of Africa because he senses impending political changes that could doom his family. He conveys that sense of danger, the fragile barrier separating peace from violence, with the simple image of his aunt in her garden. There, a “thin white washed wall” offered only a modicum of protection from the dangers of the outside world: “She was so vulnerable—her person, her religion, her customs, her way of life.” This premonition of vulnerability eventually comes true, as Salim’s family is forced from its land during a political uprising.
By then, though, Salim has already ventured to an unnamed nation in the continent’s interior. There, he witnesses political turmoil and the rise of a populist leader called simply the Big Man. Festering resentment over colonialism endangers Europeans; a missionary priest is murdered. The government tries to build a modern town, “a miracle that would astound the rest of the world”; but the project has no clear purpose and Salim correctly recognizes it as a “hoax.” Government lackeys take control of private enterprise. And Salim again recognizes the fragile barrier separating peace from violence, civilization from barbarism, when he is sent to a local jail. Salim explains that the jail, adjacent to the town’s charming market square, “had never seemed like a real jail. . . . you felt that what went on behind the low wall matched the petty market life in front.” But what he witnesses inside the prison is violent and dehumanizing: men are tortured as part of the Big Man’s reeducation process. Building on the image of his aunt’s thin wall, Salim’s experience in jail underscores the tenuous nature of civilization and peace, the thin barrier separating them from barbarism and violence. It’s not a reassuring message, but it’s an important reminder of the vigilance required to maintain civilization. It also helps explain why Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature shortly after September 11, 2001, and why his novels are particularly eloquent after October 7, 2023.
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As Daniel Deronda, My Ántonia, and A Bend in the River illustrate, great novels often explore themes and ideas of particular interest to conservative readers. This is an important fact for conservatives to remember because it hints at this truth: Political power alone is not sufficient to form—or sustain—a nation. In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, the poet and critic Dana Gioia urged conservatives to reengage with and contribute to culture. “Conservatism,” he argued, “as a philosophy, as a worldview, needs to embody and tangibly portray a complete vision of the good life, of the just society, in a way that speaks to people intuitively, in the fullness of their humanity.” Fiction, and the novel in particular, is an instrumental part of this project. Great fiction of the past has proven so, and cultivating a familiarity with that is an important step in helping future novelists create more great fiction that does the same.