It doesn’t often happen often that you read a novel that completely enraptures you. Its world feels as real as your own, but more captivating, more intense. You’re emotionally connected to a character, even anxious for them, and you’re compelled to find out how their life will turn out. You’re pulled along by your craven need to know What Happens Next.
You dread getting to The End and leaving this alternate world—yet you yearn for it, too, for then you’ll get what life rarely provides: closure.
Novels allow us to escape reality, which must satisfy a deep need, for we read novels even when reality is wonderful. The notion of summer reading assumes a beautiful setting, a breezy porch or an ocean beach, from which we will, if we’re lucky . . . escape through the pages of a book! How odd is that!
When I was a child, my idea of heaven was a beautiful garden, with flowers and butterflies . . . and in this garden, I’d be on a blanket reading a novel. Even then, I needed both the natural paradise as well as the thrilling escape from it through fiction.
As I recently devoured the novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin in a house by the beach, I felt a sense of wonderment. My world was so lovely, with the blue sea just beyond a deep lawn . . . so why was I constantly yearning to escape this calm beauty and get back to the book?
Perhaps because calm beauty is, after a time . . . well, a little boring, while a novel provides various excitements that real life rarely offers. A well-plotted book offers mounting tension, a thrilling climax, and, often, a bittersweet resolution, in which the main character implicitly learns something important.
Our daily reality rarely conforms to this satisfying pattern. Irritations rise and subside, seemingly at random; friendships founder for no particular reason; and good people suffer without achieving wisdom. The world of the novel offers a more satisfying experience. The outcome of a novel, while sometimes unforeseen, ideally seems inevitable.
But little in life is inevitable, and chance plays a much greater role in reality than we would tolerate in fiction. Character drives the action in a book, which pleases our sense of order—but life is much more chaotic. When we read a novel, we enter a world where life conforms to certain rules, and this satisfies us on a deep level. There is greater justice in a novel than in life. In fiction, the deserving often get their due.
As Miss Prism says in Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
If only life were so! In reality, scoundrels can accumulate great wealth and thoroughly enjoy their lives. In fiction, villains suffer.
In life, important events are often random, contingent, without meaning or moral or pattern. Things just happen. In novels “everything happens for a reason.”
Furthermore, novels provide us with an intimate human connection. We know the characters through their words and actions and above all through their thoughts and intentions. (Movies can only give us a character’s thoughts through the contrivance of voice-over narration.) We may know the main character of a book better than we know our good friends, and through this knowledge, through this book-learning, comes empathy.
That’s why it’s generally thought reading novels makes us better people and why it’s worrisome that many teenagers today don’t have the attention span to read an entire novel. Reportedly, high school teachers now assign short stories or novel excerpts instead of an entire book. But you lose a lot when you lose the heft.
A novel can introduce you to a whole way of life you have never known and can excite you about things to which you were previously indifferent. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about characters who make video games, a subject that previously held no interest for me. I thought all video games were shooter games. How wrong I was! The descriptions of the games they designed were so compelling I wanted to live within them, and as soon as I finished the book, I began researching which dreamlike video games I could buy and play myself.
Why hadn’t I heard of this book until now? Published in 2022, it got wonderful reviews and sold five million copies. Yet it only came to my attention when I asked my oldest son to recommend a good book. The last book that enthralled me like this was Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder.
This summer, I hope you, too, find a piece of paradise . . . then escape from it all with a novel!
Readers, if you like this post, throw me a heart! It’s important for The Algorithm and helps attract new people. Comments are even better!
I mostly read nonfiction, but I just read a novel that swept me away. It was wonderful. I won't tell you what it was. But the pleasure was intense, just as you described.
Greetings, Cathy...For me, this was one of your most pertinent pieces. We've been having an ongoing exchange with Aristu about the recent absence of books in his life.
I've printed this piece for him, and for safe keeping.
Cheers,
t