🔗 I Like Sally Rooney’s Novels - The Biblioracle Recommends:
When you get down to it, every novel is something of a con job where the author is trying to put one over on the reader. We know these people don’t exist, that everything is made up, an illusion. The great thing is that it’s not a cynical con job, but a sincere one, and the first person who has to buy the illusion in the author themselves. I’m continually reminded of the absurdity that is the attempt to write a compelling novel, and I have great appreciation for those attempts, even when they don’t work on me, personally.
What makes an engaging novel so interesting that despite knowing that I’m being conned, the novelist can make us believe, or at least set aside our objections long enough to be absorbed in this alternate consciousness.
I am not sure I could agree any more strongly with this take on novels (and fiction in general).
I occasionally joke that a novel is A BOOK OF LIES. I mean, really—it is pretty absurd. Why do I spend so much time reading hundreds of pages that someone has just made up? For that matter, why does anyone spend thousands of hours of their life making up these stories? It’s ridiculous!
And yet I keep doing it and I have shelves upon shelves of these BOOKS OF LIES and I keep accumulating more of them.
I am obviously—I hope it’s obvious, anyway—not serious about this complaint.
I will say that one thing that will quickly turn me against a book is when I can see that hand of the author at work. When there are two characters having a conversation that they would never be having other than as a means of providing information to the reader, or when plot events keep happening that do nothing in furtherance of the story, or when the main character is clearly a stand-in for the author (prestige white-guy novels, I’m looking at you, here…), it punctures that alternate consciousness and deflates it.