Living by Fiction

In her review of Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction (Harper Perennial) in the Los Angeles Times, Carolyn See writes, “Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically—even fraudulently—essays to ‘live the life of the mind’ should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon.”

(The added emphasis there is mine, simply to celebrate the use of the word “essays.” As a verb.)

My sense in the early going is that Dillard wrote this work of literary theory to argue for the kinds of fiction she finds most meaningful, and against the kinds of fiction she abhors. Coming in for entertaining and merciless criticism is the “postmodernist” fiction that was taking the publishing world by storm at the time (circa 1982), a development with which Dillard found herself at odds. “In the process of writing this book,” she says on her website, “I talked myself into writing an old-fashioned novel.” (That novel, The Living, was published ten years later.)

In Living by Fiction Dillard seeks to show that innovative approaches to fiction—especially the “shattering of narrative line”—don’t always pay off, even though in rare cases they sometimes do. “If a writer is going to use forms developed by intelligent people,” she writes with characteristic snark, “he should use them intelligently. It does not do to mimic results without due process.”

It’s not all curmudgeonliness, though. Dillard urges us to think of good fiction writers as “thoughtful interpreters of the world.” Novelists, she memorably says, “doodle on the walls of the cave. They make art objects which must themselves be interpreted. How convolute, how absurd, how endlessly interesting is this complexity!”