Diana Athill
The Road To Empathy
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
By Jane Smiley
Faber & Faber 570pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Something happened to Jane Smiley with her eleventh novel, Good Faith: others liked it but she didn’t. An exceptionally versatile, inventive and successful novelist, suddenly she had become detached from – had seen the possibility of losing faith in – her vocation. So what did she do? She decided to read a hundred novels. The logic of this decision may seem puzzling, but it led to her writing this book, so we must be grateful for it.
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