How to Read Novels Like a Professor
A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
- 336 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
How to Read Novels Like a Professor
A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
About This Book
The follow-up and companion volume to the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor âa lively and entertaining guide to understanding and dissecting novels to make everyday reading more enriching, satisfying, and fun
Of all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed... and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and today's masters, the novel has grown with and adapted to changing societies and technologies, mixing tradition and innovation in every age throughout history.
Thomas C. Fosterâthe sage and scholar who ingeniously led readers through the fascinating symbolic codes of great literature in his first book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor ânow examines the grammar of the popular novel. Exploring how authors' choices about structureâpoint of view, narrative voice, first page, chapter construction, character emblems, and narrative (dis)continuityâcreate meaning and a special literary language, How to Read Novels Like a Professor shares the keys to this language with readers who want to get more insight, more understanding, and more pleasure from their reading.
Frequently asked questions
Information
1
Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages
- Style. Short or long sentences? Simple or complex? Rushed or leisurely? How many modifiersâadjectives and adverbs and such? The first page of any Hemingway novel will impress us with short declarative sentences and a strong sense that the writer was badly frightened in infancy by words ending in âly.â Any first page by an American detective novelistâJohn D. or Ross Macdonald, say, or Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane or even Linda Barnesâwill convince us that the writer has read Hemingway. In Spillaneâs case, with no great comprehension.
- Tone. Every book has a tone. Is it elegiac, or matter-of-fact, or ironic? That opening from Jane Austenâs Pride and Prejudice, âIt is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife,â is a tonal masterpiece. It distances the speaker from the source of the âtruthâ while giving her permission to trot out an ironic statement about wives running through husbandsâ fortunes and wealthy men being more desirable than poor ones. âIn want ofâ cuts two ways at least.
- Mood. Similar to tone but not quite the same. The previous item is about how the voice sounds; this one is about how it feels about what itâs telling. However we describe the tone of The Great Gatsby, the mood of the narration, in Nick Carrawayâs person, is one of regret, guilt, and even anger, all of which sneak in between his overly reasonable-sounding statements about mulling over advice from his father and the disparities of privilege. So what is it, we wonder at once, that heâs not quite saying here?
- Diction. What kinds of words does the novel use? Are they common or rare? Friendly or challenging? Are the sentences whole or fractured, and if the latter, on purpose or accidentally? Anthony Burgessâs A Clockwork Orangeâwhich begins with the deceptively simple query, âWhatâs it going to be, then?ââhas the most remarkable diction of any novel I know. His narrator, the barely educated young thug Alex, speaks with an Elizabethan elaboration worthy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His insults are colorful and baffling to his adversaries, his descriptions and praise effusive, his curses wonders of invention, and his language shot through with a made-up teen slang, Nadsat, based largely on Slavic words. And we get the first inklings of his linguistic temperament in the novelâs opening passages. This is merely the extreme example; every novel has its own diction, and every word chosen details it further.
- Point of view. The first issue isnât who is telling the story in terms of identity. Indeed, for most of the novels weâll ever read, there is no âwhoâ in that sense. But who relative to the story and its charactersâthat we can learn straight off. Is this a â he/sheâ story or an âIâ story? When âIâ shows up we expect to meet a character, major or minor, and we immediately have our suspicions aroused. That discussion, however, can wait. If the narrative employs âheâ and âsheâ for persons in the story, with no âIâ in sight, we can be fairly safe in assuming this is a more distant, third-person narration. If the narration employs âyou,â all bets are off and we head for shelter. Happily, second-person narrations are rare, but they are, like Italo Calvinoâs experimental If on a Winterâs Night a Traveler and Tom Robbinsâs Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, very likely to be strange experiences. We can get fooled in all this; as with all literary rules, this one exists to be broken. Sometimes a character-narrator will hide culpability behind a mock third-person viewpoint, or an outside narrator will employ âIâ as a narrative gambit. Even with such tricky business, though, we sometimes get hints in the first paragraphs.
- Narrative presence. Now we can speak of that other who. Is this voice disembodied or possessed by a personage, inside or outside the story? Is it a servant talking about her masters, a victim talking about his persecutors, a perpetrator speaking of his victims? They often give us hints right away. With first-person narrators, the âpresenceâ is pretty clear. Hemingwayâs Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and Fredric Henry (A Farewell to Arms) make themselves known right away; their personality imprints itself on the text from sentence one. But what about third-person narrators? In the eighteenth century, narrators were often full of personality, genial companions who, like ourselves (so went the conceit), were men and women of the world, who understood what people were like, who were amused by the foibles of their neighbors. We see such poses in Henry Fieldingâs Tom Jones or Austenâs Pride and Prejudice. In the following era, Charles Dickensâs storytelling presence insinuates his way into Our Mutual Friend in the first five words, âIn these times of ours,â announcing that the narrator will be a very involved participant in the tale, a passionate observer and commentator. By the time we get to the twentieth century, that third-person narrator is often impersonal, detached, cool, as in Hemingway or Anita Brookner. Compare that Dickens opening to this one you probably read at school: âHe was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.â This voice is more aloof, less likely to get in there and mix it up emotionally than his Victorian counterpart.
- Narrative attitude toward characters and events. How does the narrator feel about the people and action in the novel? Austenâs narrators are generally amused, slightly aloof, a little superior. Dickensâs tend to be earnest, involved, direct (if third-person); naĂŻve, earnest, fond (if first-person). Flaubertâs narrator in Madame Bovary is famously cool and impersonal, largely in reaction to the overheated involvement of narrators in the previous romantic era. In rejecting the extant clichĂ©, Flaubert created the narrative clichĂ© that would predominate for much of the next century.
- Time frame. When is all this happening? Contemporaneously or a long time ago? How can we tell? Does the novel cover a lot of time or a little? In what part of the narratorâs life, if sheâs a character? That âmany years laterâ of the GarcĂa MĂĄrquez opening is magical. It says, first of all, that this novel will cover a great deal of time, enough for a small child holding his fatherâs hand to rise to power and fall from it. But it also says something else magical: âonce upon a time.â This is a kind of fairy tale, it says, about an exotic place and time, neither of which exists anymore (nowhere can be that backward, he hints), that were special in their own time. Any novelist who isnât jealous about those three words alone isnât very serious about craft.
- Time management. Will time go fast or slow in this novel? Is it being told in or near the now of the story or long after? Nicholson Bakerâs little gem, The Mezzanine takes placeâall of itâduring the time it takes its narrator to ride an escalator from the first floor to the aforementioned destination. In order to pull off that stunt, the writer must elongate time to the extreme, relying on flashbacks and digressions, and that strategy shows up right away, as it must.
- Place. Okay, setting, but also more than mere setting. Place is a sense of things, a mode of thought, a way of seeing. Take that T. C. Boyle opening I quote above. In the second paragraph, we learn that Mungo Park, a Scotsman, is an explorer looking for the Niger River who has taken a serious wrong turn. Place here is both locale and story. Thisâthe tent, the continent, the countryâis where he is, to be sure. But this is also where heâs an outsider, the leading edge of nascent imperial intentions, and a blunderer who keeps finding himself in variations of his current humiliating situation. In that sense, place, the immediate place, becomes motif: time after time we will see Mungo blunder into disastrous situations through total ignorance of the nature, culture, and geographyâin other words, of place. Which leads us toâŠ
- Motif. Stuff that happens again and again. Sorry about the technical jargon, but thatâs what it is. Motif can be image, action, language pattern, anything that happens again and again. Like Mungo and his recurrent disasters based on cultural arrogance. Like miracles and the colonelâs narrow escapes in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like the flowers in Mrs. Dalloway.
- Theme. Stop groaningâthere wonât be a test. Theme is the bane of all tenth-grade English students, but itâs also about, well, aboutness. Story is what gets a novel going and what we focus on, but theme is one of the things tha...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Interlude
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Conclusion
- Reading List
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Books by Thomas C. Foster
- Copyright
- About the Publisher