The chapter Psychology of the Novel, from Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel seemed very purposeless to me. I don't quite understand why someone would write a chapter explaining what is necessary in a novel, or what many authors need to do to make their novel appealing. To me, they way an author chooses to write their novel should make the novel appealing to its readers, of course there are certain measures the author must take to make it that way but there aren't any rules. It's never guaranteed that all types of readers will read these novels, but some will because they relate in some way to the novel. Smiley mentions this relationship in the Psychology of the Novel repeatedly. "When a reader reads, she is communicating with herself, but when she feels a sense of kinship with a particular novel, she feels that the author is communicating with her," (85). I agree with the idea that every reader when reading a novel tries to relate themselves with the characters or plot, by reading they think as the author had thought, thus communicating. But it isn't absolutely necessary to have built a relationship with the author in order to enjoy the novel. Being comfortable with a novel may compel a reader to continue reading the novel, but it is not as significant Smiley makes it out to be. Smiley continuously emphasizes this idea of comfort, using multiple examples to show multiple approaches of creating a connection with the reader, which for me got boring.
In the beginning of the Psychology of the Novel, Smiley mentioned how the author needs to keep the reader’s attention but I feel like she didn’t do a very good job of keeping mine, many of the statements made by Smiley seemed like generalizations which bothered me a bit. While reading this chapter I kept getting bored by how repetitive and useless it seemed. Smiley’s Psychology of the Novel really just gave an impression of being guidelines for writing a novel, which I find unnecessary. A novel is a novel, and should be written how the author chooses to write it, instead of analyzing the methods other authors used, and definitely without all this “psychology”.
When you say that it isn't important to have a relationship with an author, because being comfortable with a novel isn't really what makes a reader in the first place, I was wondering: perhaps when Smiley said having a relationship was really important, he wasn't talking about how comfortable the reader was. Sure, reading a novel that you know is good, but I think the most important thing is that you understand it. This will not make all the readers read a novel, but the ones that do and connect with the author can understand the motives and values that each character has. It gives the story more depth.
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