As an avid reader of stories, I should long ago have understood something of what recent conversations, coincidences, and news items finally made clearer for me. Yet it was not the first time I had observed how human learning often proceeds in spiral fashion: we keep circling back to our emotional swamps and stumble through them again, hopefully with greater maturity and more self-knowledge each time around. That is, if we do indeed stumble through instead of walking around them blind-folded. Which is matter enough for another time.

To call my current insight into stories the result of yet another swamp-wading is an exaggeration, though. It was more like returning to a familiar path—the problem of what makes a good story and why that matters—but seeing it differently.

From the time I learned to read, I devoured whatever fiction came to hand. If I didn’t like a book, I still finished it (having been taught that everything on my plate should be consumed, I carried that miserable discipline into other realms, even the world of stories). Since there were occasions when I needed to defend myself from unwanted moralizing, I learned to read quickly, skimming over paragraphs to get the main gist of the plot, skipping altogether the intrusive lessons I didn’t care to learn. I liked stories, not preachments.  

In university English classes, I learned to distinguish between stories that treated their characters with loving respect and stories that were spoiled by a propagandizing bent. With my newly acquired vocabulary, I could now dismiss as structurally flawed all those religious novels I had so disliked in my adolescent years. It hadn’t been my bad conscience or my refusal to accept correct doctrine that had been the problem. It had been the authors who defied artistic principles and stooped to browbeating their readers. I found that reassuring.

 And right there, in that loop of the spiral journey, I stepped around, not through, the uncomfortable truth that we do not only read books, but are, in turn, read by them. Our like or dislike of particular stories says something important about us as well as about the stories. 

 In subsequent years of reading, teaching, and writing, I learned to explore more carefully my evaluation of any given novel, especially when writing book reviews. That’s something of a clinical process, presumably conducted without rancor or prejudice. I did feel uneasy over the occasional negative review, wondering if I had done a book proper justice or if I was missing something.  

It took many animated discussions in the world’s best book club (which shall remain unnamed and secret) for me to discover that a book I disliked could teach me more about myself than I cared to know. Among close friends who are fellow readers, maintaining a reviewer’s detachment was not possible. In fact, doing a post-mortem on my distaste for a novel in the midst of questions and counter-opinions could feel like an emotional disrobing.  

Even years later, there are still books on my shelf that I cannot look at without flinching. Yet I’m grateful, truly grateful. I really did need to know that (whatever “that” was) about myself, or the next round through whatever emotional swamp that story had stirred up would be pointless.

My good friends had pushed me to descend far enough to allow myself to be read by the unwelcomed book.

The past couple of weeks I have attempted to get through the latest book for the aforementioned book club, which now functions via Zoom. The author came highly recommended; I had been eager to read the next offering from the author of Night Circus.

So I was bewildered when, after getting started, I was so easily distracted by other books. Suddenly, I felt compelled to read instead the next novel in the saga of Anne Perry’s Detective William Monk. Even a dense theology book became more inviting than The Starless Sea. Bewilderment gave way to annoyance and then outright guilt. What was wrong with me?

Now if I had had an actual book, I would have skipped through chapters, even flipped to the end, hoping that a better awareness of the overall shape of the book might change my mind about it. As of this writing, my e-copy has vanished from my tablet, on its way to another reader, possibly a more generous one. What’s left for me is to brace myself for having to figure out, in front of my friends, why I was so impatient and unloving toward this book.

Once upon a time, in self-defense, I would have turned myself into a reviewer, pulled out old notes from a graduate class on meta-fiction (fiction that writes about writing fiction, something like the popular image of the hand drawing itself), and begun researching all the multiple allusions to other stories in The Starless Sea, for the novel is nothing if not a highly literate gathering of more references to other stories than I have ever seen before.

Lacking motivation for that effort, I took the easy way out and read whatever reviews I could find. That gave me the plot of the novel, such as it has, and a wide array of responses. Some reviewers were delighted, others were not. And one—blessed be her/his name!—pointed out a principle of reading that I should have grasped decades ago. Perhaps I had, without seeing it clearly. It just took the current political climate to give it sufficient importance.

The Starless Sea has a plethora of symbols; it situates itself squarely within story-telling traditions; its descriptions are rich, poetic, even lush. The control of style is excellent and consistent. Thematically, it has considerable depth. It offers almost everything that can be said about the magic of stories and the strange reality that we all live in stories, some given and some made. What it does not offer is characters who engage our hearts. They could be bots for all the emotion they arouse. What matters is the theme, the big idea. 

Abruptly I recalled my early resentment of novels that made their characters pawns, mouthpieces for their authors’ moralizing intentions. I had always felt betrayed when books from our church library repeatedly halted the momentum of the story in order to insert mini-sermons – the equivalent of saying at the end of a fairy tale, “and now, boys and girls, you know that you should always tell the truth.” And the story dies at once.

Numerous novelists have written about the making of art: the artist who begins having already decided what “truth” or principle his characters should embody cripples both characters and the artistic process from the get-go. It’s the artist’s calling to serve the work of art, not the other way around. To know what has to be said/concluded before the story begins is to write propaganda, not story.

Which is why writers in the grip of ideology write mostly mediocre fiction with wooden characters who never achieve a life of their own. As a friend and former colleague once pointed out, “In absolute truth, and in such an ideological atmosphere, there is no room for creativity.” An economist by profession, she translated that general principle to her particular sphere of knowledge, “Government policies should be designed for the betterment of humankind, not to perfect free market.” Indeed.

During my long walks in the winter cold, when the mind randomly shuffles ideas and stories, my resistance to The Starless Sea seemed to cross over into other recent conversations in which I had tried to summarize the religious narrative in which I had been raised, and then both of those stories bounced up against the political narrative in the US to which I have given too much listening time.

And I was granted one of those rare moments: “Oh, I see. That’s what is going on here.”

All of the various meaning-making stories we live in or through (fictional or political or religious) are best evaluated on the basis of how characters function within them. What happens to the people in this story? How does this ideology shape the people who adopt it? If a religious doctrine results in the devaluation of individual human beings, if a story cares more about its symbols and general erudition than the people who move in the story, or—to take a small practical scene of utmost importance these days, if an institution cares more about its efficient routines than the well-being of people affected by those routines—something is wrong. 

Even the bleakest novel, with seemingly no real moral center, will hold our attention if even one character matters. It may be just desperate courage that engages our sympathy, or a circumstance that seems like our own, but the story has to make a place for us. Otherwise, the idea alone, the abstract theme wins. Otherwise, ideology demands its cult-like obedience and power remains unchecked.  

Heroes are heroes when they know not only that they are human but also that other humans matter as much as they do.

All of which is weightier than anything suggested by The Starless Sea, but it was a useful provocateur for one go-around on the journey.