Another world

A story creates its own world, often — though not always — with clear or mysterious correspondences to our own.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

Isaac Asimov

When reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov or Lewis Carroll, readers know very quickly that they are entering a world very different from their own. Hobbits? Robots that look and act like humans? Tweedledum and Tweedledee? This is not the world we live in, which is a big part of the appeal of these writers' work.

But Francine Prose is not just talking about the likes of Tolkien, Asimov and Carroll. She is also talking about the likes of Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, Baldacci or any other writer of fiction you might name. Every storyteller creates not just characters and a plot but a whole new world. Some fictional worlds are just more similar than others to the world you happen to live in.

In fictional worlds telemarketers rarely call. Characters rarely spend hours each day watching television. The routine labors that fill most of an average person's day rate hardly a mention. Interactions involve only a relatively small group of individuals. Characters spend little time eating and sleeping and rarely visit the bathroom. All these facts make fiction less like the real world, but also much more interesting.

In one of the essays in her book, Prose writes about Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, a six-volume, 3,500-page account that details virtually every moment of the author's life. More volumes are expected for as long as Knausgaard lives his life and writes about it. And Prose loves it.

Most of us, however, would find the very thought of reading about a stranger's life in such exacting detail to be tedious. Even our own lives aren't that interesting. When we read, give us a world that is different from our own.