People read novels for many varying reasons. They look to novels for information, wisdom, beauty, romantic inspiration, and diversion: sometimes for all these things at once, sometimes for one of these things preponderantly over all the others. In A Legacy, the excellent novel by Sybille Bedford, one character says of another that she now reads two novels a day, adding “The next stage is chocolates.”
For some readers, novels are as chocolates, things to be gobbled up till love or something better comes along to pass the time; for others, novels seem scarcely less essential than the air they breathe, and people exist— I happen to be one of them—who feel they have been educated chiefly by novels. For still some readers, a novel must have an element of elevation—it ought, in a non-Rotarian sense, to lift the spirit; for yet others, novels are best when they are non-committal and do not go beyond a strong presentation of the facts, the starker and darker these facts the better. But even among the most serious readers, all of whom are ready to agree on the general importance of the novel, there is no real agreement about what makes for a successful novel.
Serious readers of novels are likely to disagree above all about the novels of Theodore Dreiser.
Serious readers of novels are likely to disagree above all about the novels of Theodore Dreiser. (“My husband reads Dreiser and actually enjoys him,” I recently heard a
