Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

Over an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. "Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?" raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro.

Smiley explores — as no novelist has before her — the unparalleled intimacy of reading, why a novel succeeds (or doesn't), and how the novel has changed over time. She describes a novelist as "right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing," yet whose "job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive."

In her inimitable style — exuberant, candid, opinionated — Smiley invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. She walks us step-by-step through the publication of her most recent novel, Good Faith, and, in two vital chapters on how to write "a novel of your own," offers priceless advice to aspiring authors.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel may amount to a peculiar form of autobiography. We see Smiley reading in bed with a chocolate bar; mulling over plot twists while cooking dinner for her family; even, at the age of twelve, devouring Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which she later realized were among her earliest literary models for plot and character.

And in an exhilarating conclusion, Smiley considers individually the one hundred books she read, from Don Quixote to Lolita to Atonement, presenting her own insights and often controversial opinions. In its scope and gleeful eclecticism, her reading list is one of the most compelling — and surprising — ever assembled.

Engaging, wise, sometimes irreverent, Thirteen Ways is essential reading for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one. In Smiley's own words, ones she found herself turning to over the course of her journey: "Read this. I bet you'll like it."

"Smiley dazzles the reader with nearly 300 pages of zestful analysis....Smiley's brilliant and bounteous critical feat and celebration of the novel's humanitarian spirit will kindle new appreciation for the form, and inspire more adventurous reading." Booklist (Starred Review)

"Bracing literary criticism from a practitioner's point of view....Stimulating, provocative and unfailingly intelligent — in short, vintage Smiley." Kirkus Reviews

Smiley takes readers deep into the process of writing, sharing the secrets of her own habits and theories of creativity. She offers practical advice to aspiring authors and includes a reading list of novels she's read. High school & older.

Jane Smiley is the author of eleven novels as well as three works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in Northern California.

1. Introduction

2. What Is a Novel?

3. Who Is a Novelist?

4. The Origins of the Novel

5. The Psychology of the Novel

6. Morality and the Novel

7. The Art of the Novel

8. The Novel and History

9. The Circle of the Novel

10. A Novel of Your Own (I)

11. A Novel of Your Own (II)

12. Good Faith: A Case History

13. Reading a Hundred Novels

A HUNDRED NOVELS

1. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

2. Snorri Sturluson, Egilssaga

3. Author unknown, The Saga of the People of Laxardal

4. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

5. Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes

6. Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron

7. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, vols. 1 and 2

8. Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Clèves

9. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and “The Fair Jilt”

10. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Roxana

11. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

12. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

13. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote

14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

15. Voltaire, Candide

16. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

17. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

18. The Marquis de Sade, Justine

19. Sir Walter Scott, The Tale of Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor

20. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

21. Jane Austen, Persuasion

22. James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

23. Stendhal, The Red and the Black

24. Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba

25. Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

26. Honoré de Balzac, Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette

27. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

28. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

29. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

30. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Toms Cabin

31. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

32. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

33. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

34. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

35. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, The Moonstone

36. Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

37. Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin

38. Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds

39. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

40. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

41. George Eliot, Middlemarch

42. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

43. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age

44. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

45. Bram Stoker, Dracula

46. Kate Chopin, The Awakening

47. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

48. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

49. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

50. Max Beerbohm, The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford Love Story

51. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

52. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

53. Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter, vol. 1, The Wreath

54. James Joyce, Ulysses

55. Italo Svevo, Zenos Conscience

56. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

57. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

58. Franz Kafka, The Trial

59. Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

60. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

61. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterleys Lover

62. Virginia Woolf, Orlando

63. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

64. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1

65. Mikhail Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don

66. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

67. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

68. P. G. Wodehouse, The Return of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster Sees It Through, Spring Fever, The Butler Did It

69. T. H. White, The Once and Future King

70. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

71. Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

72. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

73. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

74. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate, Dont Tell Alfred

75. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

76. Jetta Carleton, The Moonflower Vine

77. Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

78. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

79. John Gardner, Grendel

80. Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

81. Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish

82. Iris Murdoch,The Sea, the Sea

83. David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?

84. Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent

85. Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

86. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

87. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John

88. J. M. Coetzee, Foe

89. Toni Morrison, Beloved

90. A. S. Byatt, Possession

91. Nicholson Baker, Vox

92. Garrison Keillor, WLT: A Radio Romance

93. Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum

94. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

95. Francine Prose, Guided Tours of Hell

96. Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life

97. Arnosˇt Lustig, Lovely Green Eyes

98. Zadie Smith, White Teeth

99. John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech

100. Ian McEwan, Atonement

101. Jennifer Egan, Look at Me

Index