Reading Like a Writer
by Francine Prose
HarperCollins

Francine Prose's latest work is subtitled "For People Who Love Books And Those Who Wish To Write Them" and it is meant to serve as both a tutorial and an inspiration. The title aims to be all-inclusive: both confirmed readers and secretly longing scribblers are welcome. It's assumed from the start that a book like this will have something to offer both camps. The problem is that Prose's master class only delivers on half of its stated premise.

Prose's tastes in literature are deep, compelling and wide-ranging. There is more than enough within these pages to fuel closer and more invigorating reading, but herein lies the problem. Her inspirational abilities, what the Greeks called charisma, are severely lacking. Tearing open classic works to see how they tick is always worthwhile. Prose does this without flaw.

She quotes Chekov to a dominant and authoritative degree: further evidence that her tastes and eye for talent are strong. There are very few writers who had as powerful an understanding of the meaning in life's details and minutia. Examples abound from his notebooks: "A bedroom. The light of the moon shines so brightly through the window that even the buttons on his night stand are visible...a tiny little schoolboy with the name of Tractenbauer." She writes movingly of reading him on public buses during a bleak period in her life. In the company of the humane Dr. Chekov, the Challenger explosion became something else entirely:

A sense of comfort came over me, as if in those thirty minutes I myself had been taken up in a spaceship and shown the whole world ... It was as if I had been permitted to share an intelligence large enough to embrace bus drivers and bus station junkies, a vision so piercing it would have kept seeing those astronauts long after that fiery plume disappeared from the screen.

Reading is more than a pasttime.

But what, the reader is bound to ask, about writing? Prose bizarrely doesn't have much to offer. It stands to reason that anyone interested in this book is already hip to Chekov, Tolstoy and Jane Austen. What they seek in Prose's experience and wisdom is not what made the greats so brilliant but how to get started on their own Anna Karenina. Here Prose doesn't help very much.

She offers scant encouragement and little inspiration on how to put tangled ideas together into literature. For example: "Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there...the final result of countless large and small deliberations." This is true, I suppose, but banal as hell. What is one to make out of those deliberations? Writing is always going to be harder than reading for just this reason, and Prose only highlights this divide.

Prose doesn't offer much in the way of an artistic boost or a lift, until the book is almost over. And what she does offer is this: "Read Chekov, read the stories straight through. EAdmit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world." Fine advice, again, but maddeningly oblique. Reading that much (a multi-volume set of Chekov is bound to take awhile) is going to drastically reduce the chance to put the books down for once and take a look at that world.

In the end, Prose's goal ruins itself. By delving deep into a great wealth of literary achievements she encourages appreciation of those works and not much else. At the end of the lesson, the reader is inspired to read — more deeply and rewardingly — but not, alas, to write.

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)