At Lady Molly’s begins with Nicholas Jenkins, having broken off his affair with Jean and now concocting “scenarios” for the film industry, being introduced through a studio colleague to the slackly-run home of the titular Lady Molly Jeavons, where he meets various members of the sprawling Tolland family (of which Molly is a part) and hears the news of Widmerpool’s engagement to an older woman, Mildred. Jenkins later lunches with Widmerpool, who quizzes him awkwardly on the propriety of premarital intercourse with one’s intended. Quiggin invites Jenkins to weekend in the country with him and Mona, who have been cohabiting since she divorced Templer. While there, Jenkins meets Quiggins’ landlord, the wealthy but left-leaning eccentric Erridge, who heads the Tolland family, and his sisters, realizing instantaneously that he’s fated to marry the younger one, Isobel. Jenkins then dines at a night club with a group that includes a jaundiced Widmerpool and his fianceé. Mr. Jeavons confidentially reveals to Jenkins a long-ago connection he has to Mildred, and dances her off as Widmerpool retires from the scene because of his illness. Erridge travels to China to investigate the political situation there, bringing Mona with him and creating a minor scandal. Widmerpool’s engagement founders, and Jenkins’ is made public. During another party at Lady Molly’s, Mildred’s brother-in-law discreetly reports to Jenkins that she dropped Widmerpool after a fumbling failure in the bedroom, immediately followed by the appearance of the jilted fiancé, who offers Jenkins advice on marriage.

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Either the books are getting better or I’m becoming more amenable to Powell’s style (or both), because At Lady Molly’s was probably my favorite in the series so far. Long out of school, the characters seem to be playing for higher stakes, and their gossip is juicier than ever. I have to keep reminding myself that the Dance was written well after the period that it describes, as it feels so authentically of that era. That’s why its fairly frank treatment of sexuality, especially alternative sexuality, is refreshing. Witness the interesting ménage that Norah Tolland and Elizabeth Walpole-Wilson establish. Powell is no radical, but neither is he judgmental, and I can think of few other novels of the 1930s that would have presented that sort of material at all.

Jenkins, as Powell’s stand-in, continues to display the same refusal to condemn anyone or anything completely. When interrogated by prospective in-laws about Widmerpool’s fitness for marriage, Jenkins conveniently and typically finds a way to politely duck the questions. Widmerpool, despite his obnoxiousness, is actually growing more respectable in Jenkins’ eyes, apparently because he’s so consistently himself. Jenkins even seems to be seeing Widmerpool as a kind of reverse doppelganger when he considers how the two of them have shared affection for the same women. I get a sense that Jenkins is wondering if there’s not something to Widmerpool’s forcefulness.

He’s not alone, either. I’m realizing that many of the most ridiculous, grotesque characters are the most strong-willed, while the ones with initially appealing personalities are vague and malleable, even unformed. Compare Widmerpool, Erridge, and even Gypsy to superficially better-mannered, socially-adept figures such as Stringham and Templer. The former achieve their desires more often than not, while the latter squander their promise and become increasingly confused about what they should be doing with their lives. Add Truscott to that list, too. Once pegged as an up-and-comer who would star in any field he chose, he still hasn’t accomplished anything and has now lost his business position. He’s the poster boy for what we talked about in earlier installments, the tendency of bright young things to fade and fall out of contact. You never know with the Dance, though—he may express some willpower and stage a comeback yet.

Speaking of the importance of will, what do you make of this from page 203, narrated by Jenkins on the topic of his own impending nuptials?

Marriage, as I have said, is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will.

How romantic. And I loved this bit from page 136 as well:

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of “getting to know” one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate. But what—it may reasonably be asked—what about the fact that only a short time before I had been desperately in love with Jean Duport; was still, indeed, not sure that I had been wholly cured? Were the delights and agonies of all that to be tied up with ribbon, so to speak, and thrown in a drawer to be forgotten? What about the girls with whom I seemed to stand nightly in cinema queues? What, indeed?

You can’t say he’s going into this with his eyes closed.

One last quote from page 97, which I share only because I had trouble making heads or tails of it:

Later that evening, I found myself kicking my heels in one of those interminable cinema queues of which I have already spoken, paired off and stationary, as if life’s co-educational school, out in a “crocodile,” had come to a sudden standstill: that co-educational school of iron discipline, equally pitiless in pleasure and in pain.

“That co-educational school” would seem to be life, and as best I can tell, “out in a ‘crocodile’” just means “walking in a pair.” So the metaphor says that life is a way of proceeding into the world in gendered pairs, but it’s temporarily ground to a halt? A lot of weight being placed on waiting in movie lines in this book. I’m surprised Powell didn’t call it Standing Nightly in a Queue.

Oh, I almost forgot to give a prize. The winner of a copy of Third Movement, courtesy of University of Chicago Press, is Mary C. Mary, contact us at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your book. We’ll take a hiatus from handouts next month, but resume the freebies in June.

Next up: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant on May 30th. Available as part of Second Movement or separately as an ebook.

—James

Painting by Max Ginsburg from the cover of the 1980s Warner Books edition of At Lady Molly’s.

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
• Book Two: A Buyer’s Market
• Book Three: The Acceptance World

Book three of the Dance takes place in the early 1930s, a few years after the events of the preceding novel. Narrator Nicholas Jenkins, while visiting his Uncle Giles, meets the dramatic Mrs. Erdleigh and has his fortune told, with a special emphasis on his so-far unfulfilling romantic life. Later, Jenkins attempts to solicit an introduction for a book through Quiggins, a collegiate acquaintance. At that appointment, Jenkins bumps into another old friend, Peter Templer, and meets Templer’s wife Mona for the first time.This leads to a reconnection with Templer’s sister Jean; the torch Jenkins has carried for her on and off since his teen years is rekindled and he embarks on a secretive relationship with her. Meanwhile, Mona leaves Templer, seduced by Quiggins’ literary prospects and exciting radical politics. Mrs. Erdleigh makes a surprising appearance on the arm of the obnoxious Jimmy Stripling, and Jean reveals an old affair with him to Jenkins. Pondering these various domestic complications, Jenkins attends a reunion dinner honoring his former headmaster Le Bas, along with Templer, the now-divorced Charles Stringham, and others. Widmerpool, once an object of scorn but fast becoming a force in business and politics, there launches into a tedious speech that concludes only when Le Bas collapses of a stroke.

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Once again, business first. The winner of our latest giveaway is Karen, who made some of our most astute comments yet on our last post. Congratulations, Karen, and contact us at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your prize, a free copy of the Second Movement. We’ll be giving away copies of the subsequent volumes in the series as we go, so let’s hear from the rest of you. All it takes to win is an opinion.

Back to the book at hand, I realize that it’s not very analytical of me to say, but I think this was my favorite section so far. The Acceptance World felt somewhat more concise than books one or two (book three is slightly shorter than the others, so this may not be an illusion), and in it Jenkins shifts closer to being an actor than an observer. He actively seeks a meeting, first with Members, then with Quiggins, about his art book project, and he’s instrumental in the dissolution of the Templers’ marriage, at least inadvertently. There’s a bit of his old vagueness when he describes his initial grappling session with Jean in the back of the car—“All I knew was that I had not thought it all out beforehand”—but he does actually admit to taking her intentionally into his arms. And we learn that he’s published a novel! So he’s not just sitting at home waiting for invitations.

Uncle Giles once again bookends the story. To me, there’s something appropriately familial about his presence in the series. He’s not around often, and he doesn’t figure prominently in the events that concern the narrator day to day, but he always returns as a constant against which the fluctuations of friendship can be measured. If Powell intends this interpretation, then I expect an increasing role for Jenkins’ family as he ages in later books. After spending his twenties (and the roaring 1920s) out of their orbit, it seems natural that he’d spin back their way as he moves into his more somber thirties and beyond.

Not just the narrator’s age suggests a new seriousness. The characters know that the market is slumping and we know even if they don’t that another war is on the horizon. Inklings of it are already here in the background, with much talk about “the situation” in one country or another and how it will or won’t affect economics at home. It’s refreshing to read from this historical perspective, about a time when Communism could be fashionable and Fascism could be comical and neither ism was very consequential.

On the level of the prose itself, Powell once again finds a neat way to sum up what he’s attempting in the series. The second paragraph on page 32 consists of Jenkins’ thoughts, but also Powell’s, I suspect:

I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed … Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification.

Thus we have a complex sequence of a dozen books instead of one brief novel.

My vote for funniest line in this book goes to one from page 108. Jenkins is conversing with Gavin Walpole about the present habits of his aristocratic daughter:

“I expect she finds plenty to do,” I offered.

“Her breeding keeps her quiet,” said Sir Gavin.

He spoke almost with distaste. However, perceiving that I felt uncertain as to the precise meaning of this explanation of Eleanor’s existing state, he added curtly:

“Labradors.”

What highlights were there for you? Don’t be afraid to mention lowlights, either. Positive or negative, comment below. I’d love to hear what you think.

Next up: At Lady Molly’s on April 25th. Available as part of Second Movement or separately as an a ebook.

—James

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
• Book Two: A Buyer’s Market
  

Book two of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time takes narrator Nicholas Jenkins to a series of parties. At a formal dance, he falls definitively out of love with Barbara Goring, who has also been the object of Widmerpool’s affections, at least until she humiliates him by dumping a container of sugar over his head. After that dance, Jenkins bumps into his former schoolmate Stringham and an old family friend, the painter Deacon. The group crashes a louche gathering hosted by Mrs. Andriadis at a house she is renting from the now-married Jean Templer, on whom Jenkins once had a crush. Over the following summer, Jenkins is introduced through Deacon’s antique shop to another painter, Barnby, and spends a weekend in the country visiting the castle of industrialist Magnus Donners, who employs both Stringham and Widmerpool. The latter embarrasses himself again by crashing his car into a driveway urn and, on the rebound from his failure with Barbara, is somehow convinced by the radical bohemian Gypsy Jones to pay for her abortion. In the fall Stringham marries Lady Peggy Stepney, and Deacon celebrates his birthday at yet another party, dying soon afterward due to complications from a tumble down the stairs. After the funeral, Jenkins unexpectedly trysts with Jones.

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I promised a giveaway, so let’s get that out of the way to start. Random selection from among the comments on the first thread gives us Smpbloch as a winner. Congratulations, and a free copy of the Second Movement, courtesy of University of Chicago Press, awaits you. Just drop us a line at info@mercerislandbooks.com to claim your prize. We have one more copy to give away, so I’ll be choosing another winner from this month’s comments, too.

Book two opens with a painting, produced by Deacon many years before the events described in the novel and discovered for sale many years afterward. The first book similarly began with the memory of art, the allegorical painting by Poussin that gives a name to Powell’s fictional cycle. Not sure what to make of that other than art’s role in the relative permanence of recollection. That would seem to be one of the central themes of the entire project.

A somewhat different tone in this installment, I thought. Jenkins remains detached, but is forced by circumstance to be somewhat more involved in the action than he was in the first book. Nonetheless, his motives remain opaque and often surprising to himself as well as to us. He’s been interested in several young women, but falls in and out of love without much understanding of how or why. He’s interpreted each infatuation as progressively more sophisticated and mature, and I’ll be curious to see if his affair with Jones fits that schema or breaks it.

Interesting too to compare the various kinds of socializing going on in this volume. Jenkins is intrigued by the relaxed conventions of the bohemian world, but also somewhat repelled. To this point, he’s thrived on rules and has yet to become comfortable without them. That formal world of debutantes and dances has yet to disappear completely, of course. I was reminded of Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, which examines the vestiges of those traditions with a fond eye. As an aside, there are far fewer troubling ethnic stereotypes to deal with in the movie than in A Buyer’s Market.

Widmerpool continues pricelessly to be Widmerpool, falling down and rising again and again. He’s almost admirable and yet horrific in his single-mindedness. I loved his sudden appearance at the dungeon window, and the way so much of his personality is explained by the simple remark that his father used to sell “liquid manure.”

I’ll be carrying two quotes with me as I proceed through the series. The first comes from page 23: “[N]othing establishes the timelessness of Time like those episodes of early experience seen, on reexamination at a later period, to have been crowded together with such unbelievable closeness in the course of a few years; yet equally giving the illusion of being so infinitely extended during the months when actually taking place.” That seems a good summation of how we live through time at different speeds, and captures the way this series is assembled, too.

The second comes from page 193: “Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition…In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best.” This applies in life as well as in the creation of literary characters. The most memorable people aren’t always the closest or the most important.

Next up: An Acceptance World on March 28th. Available as part of First Movement or separately as an a ebook.

—James

Photo from Channel 4’s 1997 TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Previous installments:

• Book One: A Question of Upbringing
  

The first book of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time introduces us to narrator Nicholas Jenkins and a handful of his friends and relations. We meet Stringham and Templer, his roommates at school, and then their officious headmaster Le Bas, who becomes the subject of a prank orchestrated by Stringham. As the young men leave school and head into adulthood, they start to move in different directions, with the cynical Templer taking a finance job in the City. Jenkins summers in France, where he dabbles in unrequited romance and re-encounters another fellow student, the dogged but inelegant Widmerpool. Jenkins returns to England to take a place at university alongside Stringham, who quickly grows disenchanted with academic life and enters the business world with the encouragement of his glamorous mother, brusque stepfather, and Sillery, a don more interested in establishing social and political connections than in teaching. The novel closes as it began, with the appearance of Jenkins’ itinerant Uncle Giles, as ever obsessed with the imagined injustice he suffers at his family’s hands.

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Well, what did you think of it, fellow readers? Hope you liked it—I did. This is intended to be a forum for voices other than my own, so I don’t want to monopolize opinion, but I’ll get us started by sharing a few thoughts I had as I turned the pages.

The newest season of Downton Abbey began airing in the US just as I was reading the book, and it coincidentally takes place at almost the exact same historical moment that A Question of Upbringing does, the first years of the 1920s. The twin subjects of the television show are society’s elite and the servants who support them, so it was interesting that Powell’s novel mainly covered the experiences of the more middling classes, relatively speaking. It occurred to me that Jenkins, the narrator of QU, comes from approximately the same milieu as Downton’s Matthew Crawley. Before the latter inherits vast wealth and a title, of course.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the book was Powell’s understated humor, as on page 21 when the narrator says, “I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements about other people.” Such an apt, devastating way to sum up Giles’ solipsism. Even though QU is full of meditative insight about human psychology, it also contains many scenes of what could be played as broad, even slapstick, comedy, as when Jenkins misdirects a declaration of love toward his landlady instead of the sweet young thing he’s had his eye on. As Powell handles it, the description is dry and self-mocking, and all the more hilarious.

I’ll be curious to see how the series develops from here, and how many of the characters we meet in the first book reappear in Jenkins’ life. Clearly, some relatively minor figures will, and others who briefly play vivid, seemingly important roles won’t. That’s a very lifelike quality, I find. The odd, inscrutable Widmerpool will certainly be seen again. After he leads the Scandinavian tennis opponents to rapprochement for motives that are unclear to Jenkins, the narrator says, “Even then I did not recognise the quest for power,” and I noted, “More of Widmerpool anon.”

Jenkins himself is probably the most fascinating figure in the book despite how little we really learn about him. He’s at the center of all the action without taking the center of the stage, and is almost staunchly noncommittal in attitude throughout. He seems to have a chameleon-like ability to convince others he’s on their side even when their points of view are diametrically opposed. Is he of Stringham’s party or Templer’s? Or neither? Does he laugh along when Stripling concocts plots to torment Farebrother or frown? It’s hard for us to tell, and it’s hard to tell whether Jenkins knows his own mind about these things.

For me, the narrator’s most emblematic moment of detachment occurs on page 57, when he and Stringham discuss Templer’s suitability for domestic life. Stringham asserts that Templer has none, and asks, “You agree?” to which Jenkins merely replies, “I see what you mean.” It’s a very non-confrontational, Seattle-style response. Sympathy for everyone is ideal in a fictional narrator, but I suspect it’s a detriment in the real world.

But enough of what I think. It’s your turn. Do you agree or disagree? Don’t just say, “I see what you mean.” You can react to what I’ve said or raise a topic of your own. (Those of you who read these posts in your email will want to click the headline at the top of the message to go to our blog site where you can leave a comment.) As an incentive for you to participate, the generous people at University of Chicago Press have agreed to donate some copies of the subsequent volumes in the series. I’ll be randomly choosing winners from among the comments, so if you’d like a FREE BOOK, speak up. Comments will remain open until our next Dance to the Music of Time post (and beyond, if you want to keep talking), so keep the conversation going.

Next up: A Buyer’s Market on February 29th. Available as part of First Movement or separately as an ebook.

—James

Photo from Channel 4’s 1997 TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Whew. The flurry of Thanksgiving is behind us, we’ve concluded a very successful book fair season, and the tsunami of the December holidays hasn’t quite made landfall. So we at Island Books have a few spare minutes to dream about the future before we climb into our bunker and spend the next month responding only to the most basic needs of the moment—food, sleep, and gift wrapping. I should be thinking about having mai tais on a beach somewhere, but instead I’m doubling down on literature by planning a reading project for 2013. Bear with me while I explain it, because it might involve you.

There’s a book, or series of books, by Anthony Powell that I’ve had my eye on for a while. Collectively the work is known as A Dance to the Music of Time, and it consists of twelve books that were published separately between 1951 and 1975. It’s all designed to hang together as one long story, and looked at in that light, it’s one of the longest novels ever written. Now, don’t get daunted yet. Each piece can stand on its own, and for purely arbitrary reasons, the Dance is usually considered as a twelve-volume cycle of fiction. Sounds less threatening that way, doesn’t it?

Even better for those of us poised to take on this monument is that it is by all accounts a supreme entertainment. Powell surveys the London social scene between the world wars in such amusing style that Time magazine referred to his opus as “brilliant literary comedy” when adding Dance to its list of the best fiction of the 20th century. He has the sophisticated eye for manners of an English Proust, but also a masterly sense of episodic pacing—the eagerness to find out what happens next in his writing is as pronounced as it is for fans of cultish, cliffhanger-filled TV shows such as Mad Men or Game of Thrones. If that doesn’t sell you, how about this? An acquaintance of mine at another bookstore described her time with the series as “the greatest reading experience of [her] life.”

There’s no time like soon, I figure, so I’m proposing to start reading with the new year and finish before it ends. Each step in the Dance is small, and taking one each month sounds manageable to me. Why am I telling you about my plan here? Two reasons, really. First, by making it public, I’m putting a little pressure on myself to stick with the project. Second and more important, I’m hoping to drag some of you along with me into my madness. We can check in with each other through the blog to make sure we’re keeping up with the reading, and talk about it, too. A virtual book club, so to speak.

This concept is entirely positive, as far as I’m concerned. You can attend in your pajamas and no one will care (or know). You don’t have to clean your house before you take a turn hosting or worry about other people’s allergies when you’re making snacks. This is the perfect book for us to read, too. If you have to miss a month or two, you won’t have to play catch-up—skip ahead to the next installment and keep going without missing a beat. And if it’s a drag, I just stop posting about it and we pretend it never happened.

Not that I expect that to be the case. I’ve sampled some of Powell’s other books in preparation, and my confidence is high. I’ve already splurged and brought home the full set, which is currently in print in a lovely edition from the University of Chicago Press. Each of the four chunky volumes has a trilogy of the original titles between its covers, comprising one movement of the Dance. When placed next to each other on a shelf, their spines form a panoramic view of the painting by Poussin (pictured above) that inspired the books and gave the series a name. You don’t have to commit to the whole thing at once, obviously. Try the First Movement on for size, or if even that’s too bulky, you can sample the series in smaller slices. Each of the dozen components is available as a separate ebook (for next to nothing, I might add). Give A Question of Upbringing a spin on your iPad or Kobo and see what you think.

As I said, I’ll be pressing on regardless, but it’ll be more fun if I’m marching forth at the head of a convivial bibliophile army rather than making a daring, Lindbergh-like solo flight. Who’s with me?

—James

Do you know the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun? The capsule version goes like this: It’s 2005 and a Syrian-American contractor is living with his family in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hits. His wife and children evacuate, but he remains behind to guard his home and help whoever he can. In the aftermath of the storm, while the city awaits federal assistance, he spends days paddling alone in a canoe through the flooded streets, rescuing trapped neighbors and bringing food and supplies to others, becoming in the process a civic hero. Suddenly, heavily armed and armored National Guardsmen burst onto the scene, and Zeitoun is summarily arrested, interrogated by Homeland Security agents, and held without counsel or contact with the outside world. Two weeks elapse before his wife even knows he’s still alive, and a full month goes by before he’s charged with the oxymoronic crime of looting his own property and released on exorbitant bail. It’s a harrowing tale (a fuller version of which is told in the Guardian newspaper) and it’s a perfect demonstration of how wrongheaded the official response to the catastrophe was, as the government hunted imaginary Islamic terrorists instead of providing aid.

He’s no symbol, though, and the story isn’t fiction. For all it sounds like something dreamed up by a novelist looking to score political points, it really happened. Dave Eggers provided the most rigorously researched and complete account in a 2009 book simply entitled Zeitoun, which was an Island Books bestseller as well as a national one. In addition to being a clear-sighted look at a city in crisis, it’s also a moving study of family strength. The relationship between husband Abdulrahman and wife Kathy is what gives the book much of its poignancy and power. Early reviewer Andrew O’Hehir of Salon said, “At first, as a reader, I felt some resistance…—could the Zeitouns possibly be as wholesome and all-American as Eggers depicts them?—but the sheer momentum, emotional force and imagistic power of the narrative finally sweep such objections away.” Zeitoun won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize as “a book with the potential to bring change to our lives,” and it brought tangible change to New Orleans. Profits from its sale were (and still are) funneled to a foundation dedicated to rebuilding the city and promoting “understanding between people of disparate faiths around the world.”

Now comes the news that Abdulrahman Zeitoun has been arrested again, this time on three counts of solicitation of murder. The alleged targets include Kathy Zeitoun. The two divorced earlier this year, and these latest charges follow multiple reports of his violence toward her. He was already in jail on charges of assaulting her with a tire iron when he reputedly solicited a fellow inmate to kill her, her son, and another man. Some hero. So is Zeitoun another case, the most sordid and depressing yet, of hyperbole and hoax in journalism? I don’t think so.

The consensus, both of those who knew the Zeitouns during that time and those who investigated afterward, agrees that Eggers reported it right. While it’s always hard to believe that upstanding, even revered, members of the community can commit such despicable acts, on rare occasions they do. Abdulrahman performed those noble deeds and suffered those trials and as far as anyone can tell, lived an exemplary life—until recently. In other words, the story is true. It’s just not the whole story. In the movies, the cowboy rides off into the sunset after saving the town and we all walk out of the theater, but in the real world there are no credits to roll. If the spirit so moves him, the good guy has time to switch his white hat for a black one and return with guns a-blazin’. A happy ending takes a twist into tragedy, followed by healing and a new beginning, on and on until there’s so much change we don’t know what to think.

Which is to say that the problem is with reality, not its representation. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed “there are no second acts in American lives.” Like much of what he wrote, that’s beautifully expressed and dead wrong. Americans (and people from everywhere else) are constantly rewriting their roles and breaking character. Any given life has dozens, if not hundreds of acts. Although to be more accurate, I should probably say that life is a play in one long act—a single, messy, complicated act that scoffs at the notion of consistency. There’s an innate human impulse to make sense of that blooming, buzzing confusion by narrating it, and those narratives enable us to navigate our world. They’re essential for existence, but they’re not the thing itself. They’re more perfect than that.

One master of such narratives, Anthony Powell, author of the epic human comedy A Dance to the Music of Time, put it like this:

People think that because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

Truer than true, fiction can never disappoint the way people can.

—James