Fiction Affliction

Of course, it is not quite fair to use Ms. Oates as the representative figure of the novelist, despite the high regard in which she is held by eminent book-bloggers. Still, I have to admit that novels and I have never been especially intimate. I’ve made a good-faith effort, but I just find most fiction boring. I understand the case for it in theory: life, with all its muddle, can be clarified and heightened through imagined scenes, characters, and dilemmas. Some people are reached most deeply by dramatization. They need to see a conflict embodied in characters, stretched across time. But in practice, others get more out of Montaigne, Hazlitt, Lamb, Epstein, journals, letters, and conversation than they ever will from a shelf of novels. They may even get more from paying close attention to actual people over the years than from reading three hundred pages about an invented family in decline. I guess my mind is drawn less to simulated lives than to clarified perception. I’m not…