The enemy of novelists?

Novelists are often portrayed by their natural enemies, biographers, as throughly in the grip of unconscious impulses or addictions or social pressures, or other forces that produce the novels, or produce what the novels really are (as opposed to what the novelists themselves thought they were).

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

There's lot to unpack in that convoluted Jane Smiley sentence, so let's take a stab at it.

The essential point may be her assertion that biographers are the "natural enemies" of novelists. Is this really true? I think of Tim Page, whose impressive biography of Dawn Powell led to a temporary revival of her work. Her books were all republished thanks to Page. There are other examples of biographers whose work revived interest in novelists.

Yet Smiley nevertheless has a valid point. A biographer's job when writing about a novelist is to not only tell us about that writer's life but also to tell us how that life became reflected in the novelist's work. Sometimes biographers go too far.

Of course, one's life is often reflected in one's writing. So many novels, especially first novels, are autobiographical. And these are often the best work the writer ever does. And the society in which a novelist is raised — Larry McMurtry on a Texas ranch, for example — often proves vital in the novels later written.

Yet biographers can give the sense that the novels are all but inevitable, that novelists are little more than conduits that lack free will. Biographers can also give the impression that their interpretation of novels is the correct one, even if novelists themselves say differently.

The beauty of great novels is that they can be interpreted differently by different people. The biographer is not always right. But then neither is the novelist.