Books&writers The lessons of fiction

The British writer Francis Spufford remarked in a recent essay that “A book is a great liberator from the tyranny of given circumstances.” Liberation of feeling and thought is often the result of reading, though this process sometimes happens when we’re unaware – and sometimes we only come to understand its power years later.

We don’t sufficiently appreciate the unintended effects of novels and stories. Most of us read fiction for pleasure, not education, but the best stories have a way of instructing. They leave behind perceptions that enrich us. George Eliot in Middlemarch sets down the intensity of small-town life in a way that seems realistic today even though she wrote it in 1870. In Great Expectations, Dickens describes, among many other things, the painful experience of outgrowing and abandoning once-cherished friends of youth. (I think I grasped that on my third reading of the book.)

A sensitive author sometimes shows us the inner lives of people who radically differ from us. If we are young, writers expose to us the thoughts of the old. If we are old, they do the opposite. They tell men something about women and women something about men. You cannot read many of Alice Munro’s stories without growing more sensitive to issues that specifically face women. Fiction, at its best, expands our moral imagination.

Mavis Gallant, working in Paris through most of her adult life, expressed the essence of multiculturalism long before most of her fellow Canadians knew the word, let alone made it a national policy. In scores of her stories, first published in the New Yorker and later in books, Gallant dealt with the clashing values and perceptions of different human beings from all over the world. Her superbly written and highly sympathetic narratives tell us what it’s like to feel alien, a subject exceptionally important in an age of mass migration.

In the 1980s, while travelling by train around several Japanese cities, I read The Makioka Sisters, a wonderfully absorbing family saga by Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965). Written in the 1940s, it describes an affluent family from 1936 to 1941. The drama focuses on the family’s difficulty finding a husband for the third sister, Yukiko. The first and second sisters are married but by custom the fourth cannot marry until the third is settled.

Formerly one of the wealthiest families in Osaka, the Makiokas watched their fortunes decline. Pride made them dismiss several marriage proposals for Yukiko but then the proposals grew scarce. Yukiko, at 30, was without a husband. The family’s discussions with their professional matchmaker, deeply tortuous, were rendered into smooth and coherent English by the translator, Edward Seidensticker.

Publication began in 1943, at the height of World War II. When Tanizaki began publishing The Makioka Sisters in serial form, government censors banned it. They said it details “the very thing we are most supposed to be on our guard against during this period of wartime emergency: the soft, effeminate and grossly individualistic lives of women.” But of course that was among the qualities I loved and still remember reading. What made me deeply grateful to Tanizaki was his delicate tone, his perceptive and sensitive account of women and men in private, revealing their ambitions, their jealousies, their family politics. Walking around the Japanese cities that month, looking at the people, I found myself in tune with them – or at least much more in tune than I could be without Tanizaki’s help.

Recently I read Colm Tóibín’s biographical novel about Henry James, The Master, published in 2004. It sets down four years in the life of James, with many flashbacks. In chronicling the writing of his books it digs deeply into his moral sense.

James, his letters show, worried about how much material he was entitled to borrow from life and precisely where he was in danger of going too far. Tóibín, who also writes fiction drawn from the life around him, lets us see the inner struggle that this entails, and puts the reader inside a credible version of the James mind. And Tóibín even deals, as discreetly as James himself, with his love for a handsome young man. James appears as a man filled with longing who has happily discovered the consoling power of writing.

We can take from The Master a sense of the 19th century as its most articulate inhabitants lived it. Tóibín’s rich intuition (and his profound research) gives him that knowledge. He passes it along to his grateful readers, whether they realize it at first or not. This is what the best writers usually do.