How To Read A Novel

Why fiction gives us an antidote to narrowband thinking.

Last week, I happened on a tweet from Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe and the excellent Stripe Press) reflecting on the ten classic “triple-decker” novels that he’d just finished reading:

This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain… For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There's something memorably compelling in Eliot's affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite. Bleak House is a close second.

His ranking more or less aligns with mine: of the hundred or so novels from the 19th and 20th century that I read during my grad school days, my favorites were Middlemarch and Bleak House, and Middlemarch is the one book that I try to re-read once a decade.

This is, I realize, not a particularly contrarian take—Middlemarch regularly tops lists of English-language novels. But of course ranking novels is inevitably a subjective game, and less important than the question that Collison raises later in his tweet essay, which is why we should read classic novels at all.

Pleasure aside, should one read these books? Does one derive moral betterment from doing so? I'm not sure. Probably not in any narrow sense. Ethicists are supposedly no more ethical than regular people -- if deliberate study doesn't help, what hope does mere fiction have? And, anecdotally, I don't consider the humanities majors to be the moral betters of the STEM students. I do think they've helped with my understanding of history, though.

I sketched out an answer to this question in my book Farsighted, arguing that novels (and fictional narratives in general) were extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events. It’s something we do so effortlessly that we rarely stop to think about how nuanced a skill it really is: creatively projecting forward into our possible futures based on our previous experience of the world. Narratives of all sorts allow you to parachute into other simulated experiences, which ultimately give you more data for your own simulations. But novels, I would argue, give you the richest simulation of the interior life of other people’s experiences: you get a ringside view of all that emotional and cognitive action. This is particularly true of the novel after, say, 1750 or so, when the novelists began adopting more of the inner monologues (both first-person and “close-third” perspective) that Shakespeare had explored on the stage.

It seems fairly obvious to me that there is practical utility in running these simulations. We accumulate wisdom that we can apply to our own lives by watching other people live theirs. Historical nonfiction—particularly if the author has access to the subject’s inner life through journals or correspondence—arguably has even more utility, in that the events in question actually happened in the real world, and not in the imagination of the novelist. (This is one reason I decided to write nonfiction instead of novels—the other being that I don’t think I’m a good enough writer to write novels.)

But my admiration for Middlemarch and Bleak House goes beyond their portrayal of the psychological interiority of their characters. (Dickens actually isn’t all that good at the inner game, it turns out.) Both novels succeed at something else: they invite us to think across multiple scales of experience—and to make causal and associative connections between those different layers. In Farsighted, I described this using a metaphor borrowed from the physics of radio waves. There were “narrowband” perspectives that focused on a single layer, and “full-spectrum” perspectives that captured a wider range of information. (Some of you will recognize Stewart Brand’s pace-layers diagram and E.O. Wilson’s consilience in this general idea.) This was how I made the case in Farsighted:

Think of the buzzing intensity of the interior monologue as the high end of the spectrum; the shifting alliances of friends and extended family and town gossip as the midrange; and the slow, sometimes invisible churn of technological or moral history as the low end of the spectrum. Some novels thrive in the narrowband. They home in on the interior monologue or the public sphere. But some novels are full spectrum. They show how those private moments of emotional intensity are inevitably linked to a broader political context; how technological changes rippling through society can impact a marriage; how the chattering of small‑town gossip can weigh on one’s personal finances.

Don’t panic if you haven’t read any of these novels—I think I can still make this meaningful without requiring any real knowledge of the plot or issuing any spoiler alerts. In Middlemarch, the key events of the narratives are all deeply influenced by forces existing at at least seven distinct bands of the spectrum:

MIND
(Dorothea’s emotional and sexual attraction to Ladislaw; her drive for intellectual autonomy)

FAMILY
(The possibility of having children; the impact on her choices on her father and sister)

CAREER
(Dorothea’s active oversight over the Lowick estate, and the social impact of “improving” Lowick)

COMMUNITY
(The town gossip, which is effectively its own character in the novel)

ECONOMY
(The financial consequences of relinquishing Causabon’s fortune)

TECHNOLOGY
(The chaos of the railroad; the productivity of the new agricultural techniques.)

POLITICS
(The reform movement that catalyzed the events of 1832; Ladislaw’s political ambitions within that movement.)

I can’t tell you whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written. I’m not even sure you could plausibly declare any one novel “the greatest.” But I think you could make a convincing case that Middlemarch is the novel that best integrates all seven of those layers. Compare Middlemarch to earlier classics from Austen or the Brontës, and the difference is almost immediately apparent. The emotional and familial layers in, say, Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre are fully developed. But the geo-political or technological forces that were transforming English society in the first half of the nineteenth century do not propel the narrative in any material way. And where they do exert influence, their roles are subtle, almost camouflaged, as my old teacher Edward Said argued about the relationship between overseas imperialism and Austen’s narratives. As brilliant and entertaining as those novels are, their natural home is the drawing room, or the cotillion. That is the scale at which those stories operate. Middlemarch never lets its reader (or its characters) settle too comfortably into those drawing‑room conversations. There is always a larger, bustling world banging on the windows.

Bleak House pulls off a comparable feat. As in most of his later novels, Dickens builds a narrative that manages to connect a staggeringly wide cross-section of the social classes of industrial London, and the superorganism of the city itself is genuinely a character in the book. And Bleak House added a new band to the spectrum, one that becomes central in 20th-century classics like The Trial, 1984, or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: the bureaucratic state, most famously the Court Of Chancery with its endless litigations and a whole comical troupe of nascent knowledge workers churning through “bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense.”

The problem with Dickens is that the people themselves aren’t quite real. Dickens does the low ends of the spectrum as brilliantly as anyone (metropolis, industry, bureaucracy) but at high-end the characters have a tendency to devolve into caricature. Orwell described it best in his famous 1940 essay, comparing Dickens to another giant of the 19th-century novel:

Why is it that Tolstoy's grasp seems to be so much larger than Dickens's — why is it that he seems able to tell you so much more about yourself? It is not that he is more gifted, or even, in the last analysis, more intelligent. It is because he is writing about people who are growing. His characters are struggling to make their souls, whereas Dickens's are already finished and perfect. In my own mind Dickens's people are present far more often and far more. vividly than Tolstoy's, but always in a single unchangeable attitude, like pictures or pieces of furniture… Dickens's characters have no mental life… They never learn, never speculate.

Back to Collison’s original question: why should we read these books? To me, the answer comes down to this: getting your brain to accurately assess the full spectrum takes effort, but it’s a valuable skill to have in life. If you over-index on one layer at the expense of the others, you’ll end up making less nuanced choices, both personally and professionally, because your mental model about what is actually happening at a given crossroads of your life will be too narrow. And so we should embrace any opportunity to practice thinking across scales, in part because most educational environments are deliberately designed to keep you specialized in one part of the spectrum. So in a way, I’ve come to think about books like Middlemarch or Bleak House—using the language of deep learning—as a source of training data for full-spectrum thinking. They are trial runs that prepare you for the real thing.

There are other reasons to read novels, of course; both Middlemarch and Bleak House have beautifully crafted plots that are genuinely fun to unravel, if you can keep track of the characters, and there are some legendary sentences in each book. Another reason to read them—which Collison emphasizes as well—is that they are extremely effective vehicles for time-traveling back to earlier periods in history. There is, I think, something intrinsically valuable in having that glimpse of humanity in a slightly different configuration—different values, technologies, economic structures—that widens your perception of your own moment. No doubt traditional history books (and period film/TV narratives) can transport you to an even more accurate rendition of the past. But the novel gives you the best glimpse of what it really felt like, from the inside, to live through those earlier ages.

All of which raises the question: are people still writing novels like Middlemarch and Bleak House? I can see some of that tradition in books like Franzen’s Freedom, or maybe Tart’s The Goldfinch. I had been hoping for something in that mode with Zadie Smith’s last novel The Fraud, which actually features Dickens as a character, but it turned out to be a slightly different kind of book. I’d be curious to hear who you all think are the heirs to Dickens and Eliot today. Or has something changed in the culture that now makes it harder or less interesting to write that sort of full-spectrum narrative?

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And finally, happy new year to all of you! Thanks to all the NotebookLM craziness, this turned out to be one of the most fascinating professional years of my life, even if it did keep me from embarking on my own next book project. One of my goals for 2025 is to get started on that project, and to figure out a way to involve the Adjacent Possible community as I develop the ideas. (I’m also incredibly excited to actually write a book from scratch using NotebookLM, as you might imagine; if you haven’t seen the new UI we rolled out a few weeks ago, definitely check it out.) More on that book project to come…

[Art by ImageFX—I am weirdly obsessed with generating these simulated wood carving illustrations using AI. The prompt was: “create a wood carving that shows the range of human experiences in 19th-century urban culture: mental life, family, community, economy, technology, politics. at the center of the piece, show someone reading a novel.”]