The people we know best

A great part of the appeal of reading fiction is the discovery that the reader knows much more of the inner life of the characters in the book than of his or her own family members or friends.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Paul Theroux

This statement by Paul Theroux may seem startling at first. Can it possibly be true that I know Huckleberry Finn or Scout Finch better than I know my own child? How can I possibly know more about the people in that mystery I'm reading than I know about my best friends? They aren't even real people, but just fictional characters.

Yet of course it is true. The key is that phrase Theroux uses, "inner life," referring to thoughts, feelings and secrets. In the real world, the only inner life we can know anything about is our own. There are, of course, those people who seem always ready to share their thoughts, feelings and secrets with us, whether we are interested in them or not. Once they do, however, these revelations cease to be "inner life," and there will always be some thoughts, feelings and secrets that remain unrevealed.

Reading fiction is like reading minds. The reader quickly learns things about fictional characters that could never be known about a friend or relative. In real life we often don't understand why people do the things they do. In fiction we do because authors tell us. This insight does not transfer from page to screen, a big reason why movies are rarely as good as the books from which they were adapted. Showing an actor's face is about all a director can do to reveal what is going on in a character's mind, which is about all we have in the case of the people in our own lives. In real life we read faces, voices, actions and words and from this must deduce what a person is actually thinking. An author writing in third person can simply tell us.

Consider these opening lines from novels:

"Her first name was India — she was never able to get used to it." — Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell Jr.

"Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours." — Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

"Harmony is driving home, eastward out of Las Vegas, her spirits high, her head a clutter of memories." — The Desert Rose by Larry McMurtry

"As Benedict Stone huffed his way to work, the sweet smell of the cherry scones in Bake My Day made him forget for a moment that his wife, Estelle, had packed her purple suitcase and moved out of their home." — Rise & Shine, Benedict Stone by Phaedra Patrick

In each case the words sound like fiction, not fact, and the giveaway is the inner life the lines reveal. Maybe someone writes lines like these in a biography, but not likely. The novelists take us inside a character's mind. India has never gotten used to her name. Hale knows someone wants to murder him. Harmony is happily pondering a clutter of memories. Benedict Stone momentarily forgets that his wife has left him. Were these real people, our friends perhaps or even members of our own family, we might never know these things about them.

All this makes reading pleasurable, even if those fictional people in our books can never really replace the real people in our lives.