A social experience

The extremity of the Dostoevskian world is a good reminder that the prolonged exposure to a novelist's sensibility required by a lengthy novel is akin to a long train ride with a stranger, sometimes more demanding and uncongenial than the reader is prepared for. In that sense, every novel is, in the end, a social experience as well as an experience of solitude.

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jane Smiley compares reading a long novel, like Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot, to talking to a stranger on a long train ride. I don't know why the metaphor would not work just as well with a short novel and a short train ride.

Later in her book she states that "the novel is always a social occasion."

The point is that even though one may be reading in solitude, there is a conversation going on. The author is speaking to you and, at least in your own mind, you are speaking back.

Sometimes authors, in a sense, become our friends, and we keep returning to their novels because we enjoy conversing with them. A novel by a new author is more like talking with a stranger on a train or a plane. One never knows what to expect, whether we are going to like this person or not. What the author says may surprise us or even shock us. The language used by an author may repel us or confuse us — or simply delight us.

Yet the social experience of reading a novel, it seems to me, involves more that just conversing with the author. One also meets a variety of characters. And like the strangers one might meet at a party, you are drawn more to some than others. Some you want to spend more time with, others you would prefer to avoid.

Again, the appeal of novel series with continuing characters has to do with our wanting to spend more time with old friends. I keep reading Alexander McCall Smith's novels set in Botswana because I enjoy sitting in on conversations with Precious Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni and the others. Reading novels is indeed a social experience, ideally a rewarding one.