I see men in such a way that the best novels seem to me to be peopled with cardboard cut-outs — and it could not be otherwise.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2

Drew Calvert:

Whereas self-help offers insight and fantasy offers what Iris Murdoch calls “consolation,” a good novel requires us to transcend our atomized, alienated condition and allows us to perceive the world precisely and humanely.

I agree that it is a good thing to attempt to transcend our limited, self-absorbed perspectives, and that reading is a good way to do this. Personally, most fiction fails to interest me. The fault may be mine, though I don’t really see it as a failure deserving of blame in any case. Valéry’s line, if taken at face value, could seem arrogant and status-oriented — “I’m so deep and thoughtful that even Great Novels seem like potboilers to me.” I don’t think that’s how he meant it, and it’s not how I mean it, but the fact remains: most fictional stories go down like raw vegetables for me, even when prepared by Michelin-starred chefs like Tolstoy and Chekhov.

However, if “enlarging perspective” or “decentering yourself” is the goal, there are other methods, fortunately. History can do it. Philosophy can do it. Religion can do it. Biography, anthropology, science, travel, friendship, work, family obligation, even serious attention to another person can do it. So can encountering institutions, traditions, or ways of life that make your own assumptions look provincial. Lin Yutang wrote, regarding those who had taught him something important about life:

Some of my sources are: Mrs. Huang, an amah in my family who has all the ideas that go into the breeding of a good woman in China; a Soochow boat-woman with her profuse use of expletives; a Shanghai street car conductor; my cook’s wife; a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York; a deck steward who made one good remark; that writer of a column on astronomy (dead for some ten years now); all news in boxes; and any writer who does not kill our sense of curiosity in life or who has not killed it in himself…how can I enumerate them all?

Curiosity directed outward would seem to be the important quality. Everyday life doesn’t require artistic mediation before it becomes material for reflection. Why read novels? Because they teach us to perceive the world precisely and humanely. How do we know novels do that? Because the good reader attends carefully to the lives represented in them. But careful attention is already the active ingredient. The novel is only one occasion for exercising it. Don’t wait for reality to be preselected, composed, and rendered significant by a novelist. Look around. The world is already full of material.

Which, amusingly enough, brings us back to Calvert’s essay; specifically, his very first paragraph:

In the summer of 2020, I was reading in a laundromat in Pomona, California, when a fellow patron raised her voice above the whirr and clink of the dryer to ask a surprising question: “Is it helping you?” I glanced up, and she gestured at the book in my hands, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh’s darkly comic novel about a college grad who tries to sleep for a whole year to avoid the pain of grief and loss. I realized the woman had guessed from the title that I was reading self-help. “Too early to tell,” I said, smiling, trying to be convivial, though in truth I hoped for a swift return to reader-friendly silence. We had a brief exchange touching on mindfulness, CBD oil, and the day’s pandemic numbers. She asked if I had ever considered psychedelic therapy; I answered in the negative. When her tossing garments fell still, she didn’t bother to fold them. She just carted them out like a lover’s corpse and heaved them into the trunk of her car. I was glad to be alone again, but her question lingered in the air. The novels I was reading—were they helping me? I had no idea.

Let us attend to this, because it is astonishing and hilarious. He encounters an actual person, in an actual public place, who initiates a conversation. She gives him exactly the sort of little rupture in routine that a novelist might use as an opening: a stranger, a strange question, a peculiar manner, a bit of social friction. Is this not exactly what all his reading has supposedly been preparing him for? Is he not the same person who, later in this very essay, muses about how fictional characters can be “important sites of readerly compassion”? Is this not a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how literary fiction has exercised his “capacity to love”? But no; his response is essentially: Good heavens, the unedited public has intruded upon my mediated encounter with humanity through literature, which teaches me to transcend my atomized condition. Even the gratuitous details — she didn’t fold her clothes; she carried them “like a lover’s corpse” (?) and “heaved” them into her trunk — seem designed to make her seem inattentive and careless. They invite us to experience her as mildly grotesque before she has said much of anything. She becomes a comic specimen whose chief narrative function is to exemplify the shallow self-help mentality that the cultured reader will transcend. Who needs a novel? No fictional parody of the self-important Serious Reader with his head wedged up among his intestines could possibly improve on this. Calvert has unwittingly presented himself exactly like Jerome K. Jerome’s narrator in Three Men in a Boat, except that Jerome’s narrator failed the moral test for comic effect. Calvert seems unaware there even was a test.

We don’t know what Laundromat Woman is really like. She may very well be flighty and tiresome to know. But what we do know is she attempted to be friendly to a stranger during a trying time, the pandemic. He, in return, gives the impression of peering at her over his monocle like she was a bug who crawled across his page. Many paragraphs later, he ruminates on Pope Leo talking about serious reading being part of a “culture of encounter.” He likes this phrase because it captures what he values about the sense of compassion one can feel for a fictional character. Self-help, by contrast, by keeping the focus strictly on the immediate self, protects readers from “a genuine encounter.” Thus the comedy:

The universe: It’s genuine encounters you want? Here is another human being.

Calvert: Eww, gross, not like that. Do you have anything by Henry James?

Ivan Karamazov, though himself fictional, understood this. Real people are hard to love, because they smell bad, they have stupid faces, they step on your foot, and they prattle on about CBD oil and mindfulness. But if the point is genuinely to “perceive the world precisely and humanely,” that is the meaningful challenge. It is easy enough to grant sustained attention to a human being after Chekhov has performed all the editorial labor necessary to make her interesting. Laundromat Woman arrives without arrangement. She may be tedious, intrusive, foolish, warmhearted, perceptive, lonely, and probably some untidy combination. Nobody has selected the significant details for you. You don’t even know whether the experience is going to prove worthwhile. There is no guarantee that she will turn out to be profound rather than irritating. A fictional character, on the other hand, cannot interrupt you, misunderstand you, or bore you beyond endurance. The “encounter” may be emotionally powerful, but it is also perfectly safe. You can close the book whenever you like.

What Calvert seems to value is not encounter as such, but a very particular species of encounter: mediated, chosen, aesthetically prepared, and entered on his own terms. Not so different from those shallow self-help readers after all, it appears.