In assigning three stars to this book I may be misleading the reader. For those attuned to Jane Smiley's sensibility, this will be a five-star book; for those who are not it will be a one-star book. This is not a study of the novel as form so much as it is what the title infers--ways of looking at the novel. As such it is more personal (some would say idiosyncratic) and, as inferred above, of varying degrees of usefulness.
The book actually attempts to do several things at once: a) explore key aspects of novelistic fiction; b) offer advice on the writing of novelistic fiction; c) record personal experience with regard to the writing of specific novelistic fiction; and d) discuss 100 novels. It is thus, by turns, a scholarly book, a how-to book and a reference book.
The discussions of novelistic fiction are interesting. They are particularly interesting because they are out of the critical mainstream. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since previous scholarship canalizes discussion and, in its way, narrows the imagination. Jane Smiley's reflections, e.g., on the origins of the novel are, as a result, quite different from those of Watt, McKeon, Hunter, Doody, et al. who tell a very different story than the story told here. Most scholars will find Smiley's comments naďve and uninformed though not uninteresting and not without their uses.
The how-to sections of the book are also interesting, though they are not as systematic as one would expect in a how-to book. Aspiring novelists will enjoy Smiley's anecdotes, her encouragement and her wisdom. Nevertheless, they are still likely to need a more consciously hands-on book like Scott Meredith's.
The discussions of the 100 novels are unsystematic. They consist of reflections, not discrete, consistent bodies of information. Thus they make for an engaging `read' but they do not serve the purposes that reference books serve. The remarks are somewhat idiosyncratic and, hence, potentially valuable. At other times they are remarkably naďve. Two small examples: Smiley does not have a developed sense of genre. Thus, she discusses Wuthering Heights and Moby-Dick as novels rather than (as many would) romances. This is fairly basic stuff to the professoriate, Frye 101 if you will. "Tales" are different from "short stories," for example, and lumping the two together leads to problematic conclusions. Second, Smiley has strong views which she does not hesitate to inject into her book. Strong views are fine, but they prove problematic when they distort discourse. In her discussion of Conrad, e.g., she attributes the attitudes of Conrad's narrator to Conrad himself. In the case in question we are not talking about an implied narrator, but a very carefully constructed, independent narrator, one who appears in other works of Conrad, a narrator Conrad discusses and describes as an independent creation. Confusing a narrator's experiences and views with those of the author is a very basic error, the sort of thing that one learns in English 101. I can only assume that she has been blinded by her personal views and that this is a momentary lapse.
Bottom line: never dull, often insightful, but not for all tastes and not for readers with specific needs seeking specific information.
