How to Read a Novel

The following excerpt from Susan McCloskey's 1999 summer seminar talk represents approximately half her lecture. A complete version will soon be available as a The Objectivism Store audiotape. At TOC's Summer Seminar 2000, McCloskey delivered a talk entitled "Oedipus, Hamlet, and the Meaning of Tragedy."

Reading a novel can involve a great deal more than attending to the fundamental elements of plot, character, and theme. Indeed, reading a novel is like traveling in a foreign country. The experience makes us aware of ourselves as strangers, pushed by our strangeness into the role of observers. And the pleasure of our travels often lies in our careful observation of and reflection on the things around us. When we begin to read an unfamiliar work of fiction, we have to orient ourselves to the new world in which we have arrived. We must accustom ourselves to the sounds and rhythms of a language that differs from the one we are daily accustomed to. We find ourselves, in this unfamiliar context, alert to details we might not have noticed at home. We try to understand-and if we're courteous travelers, to respect-the conventions of this new place. And when our experience ends, we reflect on it, turning it over in our minds until we have a sense of its shape and its meaning.

I want to take up each aspect of this extended metaphor in turn: arriving in the novel's world, adjusting to its language, attending to its details, understanding its conventions, and apprehending the shape of the experience it presents. As you'll see, these aspects of a novel often bear directly on matters of plot, character, and theme, but they should claim our attention in their own right, too. To make my remarks fully worth your while, I'll be drawing my illustrations from two novels you know well, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. If I succeed in my goal, you'll have a clearer sense of how to read a novel. And I hope your pleasure in the process will be enriched.

The Opening Pages

My first suggestion is to read the opening pages of a novel deliberately, attending closely to the information our guide, the narrator, gives us about the foreign world we are entering. In a well-written novel, these pages are often the expression in little of the novel's preoccupations and a guide to its proper reading. For instance, The Fountainhead begins with laughter and the image of a naked man standing on a rocky height, poised to plunge into the water beneath him. Everything in the scene rivets our attention on this figure: how he looks, the relaxed poise of his limbs, the orange color of his hair. His privacy is emphasized by his nakedness. The narrator lets us enter that privacy by sharing with us the man's thoughts about his natural surroundings and his experience earlier in the day. In a few brief pages, we learn something of his circumstances and his passion. Then we watch him take the plunge, swim across the lake, dress, and walk from the lake past a dump, into a town filled with ugly buildings, and into the dwelling where Mrs. Keating stands as a repellent guardian at the door.

These pages alert a careful reader to several things, the full significance of which will emerge only later. But even without the advantage of hindsight, we can surmise that Howard Roark is the novel's main character and that architecture is one of its principal concerns. After all, Roark and the narrator alike think in architectural terms. For him the stone and trees are raw material awaiting his shaping hand. Sharing Roark's passion, the narrator pauses to describe Roark's naked body as a series of lines, planes, angles, and curves, pauses in the brief tour of the town to take special notice of Stanton's ugliest domestic and public buildings.

We might also notice things that we cannot yet account for: that Roark's presence seems to transform the natural world around him, so that, paradoxically, "the water seemed immovable, the stone flowing." Yet the man so intensely attuned to his surroundings on the cliff is unaware of the people who stop to gaze at him as he passes by, some of whom feel a flash of "sudden resentment" towards him. He is as apart from them as he is joined to the cliff, which-in another reversal of the usual order of things-seems "anchored" to his feet.

Two pages into the narrative, in other words, Rand has already suggested her novel's central preoccupations: Roark, his difference from and indifference to other people; the force of his passion for his chosen work, which his expulsion from the Stanton Institute has affected not at all; and his power to agitate the stone on which he stands, the townspeople by whom he walks, and of course, the baffled Mrs. Keating, who worries that Roark will one day "smash her coffee tables." A betting reader would feel fairly sure that at least one of this novel's purposes will be to reveal the Roarkness of Roark, to present the sense of life that makes him the arresting, at this point mysterious, figure he is.

My first suggestion about how to read a novel has a corollary: Having read the opening pages slowly and alertly, reread them when you finish the novel, so that you can see how the end is implicit in a well-crafted novel's beginning. This experience is striking in The Fountainhead, where we find Roark at the end of the novel once again poised atop a stony height-this time, the Wynand Building-once again at ease between the water below and the sky above.

Verbal Style

As we move inside a novel's world, we must also accustom ourselves to its verbal styles, to the characters and the narrator who speak our language, but with a difference. My second piece of advice about reading a novel is to attend, now and then, to the characteristics of its language. When you find an image or a passage particularly arresting, pause to study it. Read it aloud. Listen to its rhythms. Notice its features. To read any literary work without making its verbal style a matter of conscious appraisal is like looking at a painting without noticing its colors or standing before a beautiful vase without regarding its shape.

If we pause to attend to the language of The Fountainhead, for instance, we learn almost immediately that Roark is the master of the monosyllable-a fact Rand exploits to comic effect in his opening exchange with Mrs. Keating. Here is the complete list of what Roark says in response to the far more verbally eager Mrs. Keating: "Yes?" "What?" "Well?" "Thank you," "I don't know," and "Today? Oh yes." Meanwhile, Mrs. Keating busily struggles to build on this small conversational foundation a towering tribute to her son's brilliance and her own self-sacrifice. The fewness of Roark's words here and throughout much of the novel is interesting in itself. Having noticed it, a reader may then appreciate how Roark's verbal style emphasizes his self-sufficiency. He seldom feels the need to express his thoughts or initiate conversation, so when he does either, as with Wynand or Dominique, we pay special attention. His customary silence-"reticence" would be the wrong word for Roark-makes his long speech at the trial all the more striking. His casual acquaintances, I suspect, would not have known he had it in him.

By contrast, Ellsworth Toohey is a great talker with a distinctive style; indeed, in Part I we encounter him not as a character, but as words-first those of Sermons in Stone and then those of the disembodied voice addressing the strike meeting. Rand's unusual choice to keep Toohey "offstage" and to characterize him exclusively through his language should arrest our attention. This brief sample of the rhetorical style of his strike speech may indicate what Rand gains by the choice:

Our will-the will of the disinherited, the forgotten, the oppressed-shall weld us into a solid bulwark, with a common faith and a common goal. This is the time for every man to renounce the thoughts of his petty little problems, of gain, of comfort, of self-gratification. This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future.

Attending to this language pays dividends of meaning, telling us a great deal about Toohey's character. For instance, Toohey clearly knows how to rouse his audience's emotions. The nearly equal length of his sentences creates the passage's stately rhythm, which the rhetorical devices support-the repetition of "will," "willing," and "unwilling"; the emphatic repetition of "this is the time" in the second and third sentences; the balanced doublets and triplets of "a common faith" and "a common goal"; "the disinherited, the forgotten, the oppressed"; "of gain, of comfort, of self-gratification." The emotive power of these grand abstractions, however, does little to disguise the vacuousness of the thought. If we're all going to be swept up, willy-nilly, in the rising tide of the future-as if a living being had a choice in the matter-why should we take the trouble to weld ourselves into a solid bulwark? Toohey, in short, is saying nothing at all, eloquently. In this snippet of his speech, what Rand gives us, long before we have seen the man himself, is his measure.

Toohey's conversational style is notably different. His spider-like way of drawing his prey into his web is to pose questions that usually make his interlocutors reveal far more than they realize, while revealing almost nothing about Toohey himself. Indeed, the very last words he speaks in the novel are these, in reference to his new employer at the Courier: "But Mr. Talbot as a man? . . . What's his particular god? What would he go to pieces without?"

Having established this characteristic of Toohey's style, Rand uses it to dramatic effect near the end of The Fountainhead. When Toohey comes to see Keating during Roark's trial, the insinuating questions cease as Toohey reveals his response to Roark with declarative candor. The balance and control of his verbal manner in the strike speech assert themselves and then drop away as the pressure of his hatred of Roark reduces him to mere fragments of utterance: "I don't want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped-and alive."

In her handling of Toohey's language, Rand implicitly makes the point that Toohey, the dangerous master of language, can also be betrayed by it, can be forced by the intensity of the power-lust that motivates him to drop his urbane pose and reveal himself as the monster he is. Paying attention to the words counts, in short, because they are all a writer has to work with, whether the writer is Toohey or Rand.

Details

After we've gotten our bearings in the world of a novel and have adjusted to the riches of its language, we have leisure to look about us and notice details of several sorts. Attending to the details in part means becoming more self-conscious about our own observations and reactions. My third piece of advice about reading a novel is not only to notice that certain details arrest our attention, but to notice that we've noticed, and to think about why the writer might have wanted us to notice in the first place.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand offers us a scene of industrial rack and ruin, the snowstorm in the Rockies that for several days traps three Taggart trains and their passengers, with slim hope of relief. I've chosen the last part of this passage to illustrate another way in which Rand's details matter.

Through the driving mesh of snow, the passengers trapped aboard the trains looked out at the lights of Winston's shanties. The lights died in the night of the second day. By the evening of the third, the lights, the heat and the food had given out aboard the trains. In the brief lulls of the storm, when the white mesh vanished and left behind it the stillness of a black void merging a lightless earth with a starless sky-the passengers could see, many miles away to the south, a small tongue of flame twisting in the wind. It was Wyatt's Torch.

By the morning of the sixth day, when the trains were able to move and proceeded down the slopes of Utah, of Nevada, of California, the trainmen observed the smokeless stacks and the closed doors of small trackside factories, which had not been closed on their last run.

"Storms are an act of God," wrote Bertram Scudder, "and nobody can be held socially responsible for the weather."

The passage opens by contrasting nature's destructive efficacy and the inefficacy of the man-made means of controlling nature. In this collapsing world, Nature appears to be the only industrial power remaining: the storm "blocked the passes. . . raising white walls thirty feet high"; it created a "mesh" of snow. In the first paragraph quoted above, this careful marshalling of detail-of the storm, of the trains, then of the passengers on the trains-takes on a particular resonance. Here, the details evoke the traditional account of creation, the six days of Genesis, in which God created the light, the sky and the land, the sun to warm, and the vegetation and animals to nourish the pinnacle of his creation, Man. Here, however, the creative process reverses itself: the lights outside the train are extinguished on day two; the light, heat, and food on the trains have run out by day three. At the end of the paragraph, the unformed void has come again, a still, "black void merging a lightless earth with a starless sky." Underlining the allusion to Genesis, the passage ends on the sixth day with the voice not of God speaking the last words of creation on that day, but of Bertram Scudder citing "an act of God" to disclaim for the looters all responsibility for what their policy hath wrought.

Allusions of this sort are frequent and usually purposeful in literary writing, and Rand's work is no exception. Such allusions enrich our experience of a text, giving us, in effect, two meanings for the price of one. The situation of the passengers stranded in the storm is significant in itself: It tells us that the looters' efforts to control the economy have not only hampered or destroyed the producers' efforts but have also imperiled lives. The allusion to Genesis enhances that significance, suggesting that the consequence of those policies is to reverse progress itself and return the world to the elemental chaos out of which it was formed.

Conventions

My fourth piece of advice is that you recall that literary creation depends at least in part on convention and that you notice how a particular writer uses the conventions at his disposal. Here's what I mean: No writer undertakes the work of writing as if he were a blank slate, ignorant of other writing. And what is true of writers is also true of readers. No reader comes to the act of reading with a mind wiped clean of memories of other things read. If I've selected a murder mystery, I expect the writer to play by the rules-that is, to honor the conventions of that form. If the conventions are honored, I will consider my time well spent. If they are not honored, I will feel cheated.

My point is that literary readers think about conventions-of form, plot, characterization, style, and so on-because writers use them. Seeing how skillfully a particular writer does so is part of the pleasure of reading. Think, for instance, of the novels you've read or even the movies you've seen in which a gala party takes place. In the party scene you're thinking about, I'm willing to bet that the novelist focuses on the behavior of one particular young woman and one particular man. This ball has brought them together for the first time, perhaps, and they fall in love as they dance. Or they may already love each other, and something happens to alienate them. Whatever the particular case, the ball exists in the novel to bring about, advance, or disturb a connection between a man and a woman. Ayn Rand knew this, and the Reardens' anniversary celebration is one of the best scenes in the novel precisely because Rand evokes, subverts, and transforms its conventions so brilliantly.

Dagny comes to Rearden's anniversary party with the intention of seeing Hank outside the context of their offices. She wants to let him know that she is aware of him as a man as well as a supplier, and she wants him to be aware of her as a woman. But Dagny is disappointed. Hank is so racked with guilt about his feelings for Dagny that he does his best to suggest quite their opposite. He is courteous, impersonal, and formal, leaving Dagny with the sense that she is speaking to a stranger.

And yet there is a highly significant meeting at this party nonetheless. The person who stops traffic upon entering the room is not the lovely Dagny, but the elegant, notorious Francisco. Heads turn to watch him, "as if he pulled them on strings in his wake." The private meeting in the alcove-the perfect place for lovers-is not between Dagny and Hank, but between Hank and Francisco. What begins there-on Francisco's part, patiently; on Rearden's, reluctantly-is a friendship between two men, not a love affair between a man and a woman. The particular sizzle of this scene derives from Rand's relying on our expectations of what a conventional party scene is like and then giving us something different-in this case, a relationship far more significant to the novel's meaning than is Dagny's affair with Rearden.

As I've already suggested in my reference to murder mysteries, an author's use of convention extends beyond isolated scenes. We know, for instance, that in a romantic comedy, the boy will meet the girl, lose the girl, and get the girl again. Thus, formal conventions allow us, with reasonable certainty, not only to predict the outcome of events, but to apprehend their significance as they occur, to see their place in the novel's emerging design. In that design-and in the artful making of that design-lies, in part, the novel's meaning.

One of the pleasures of Atlas Shrugged lies in Rand's exuberant use of multiple formal conventions. The novel is a mystery: Who is John Galt? Why is Francisco behaving in such an unaccountable way? It is also a love story: Will Dagny ever find the man at the end of the rails? It has elements of science fiction-in Project X, Galt's disappearing lab, the shield over Galt's Gulch-and of the thriller: Will Dagny reach Quentin Daniels before her nemesis plucks him-and the motor-out of her grasp? It even borrows a convention of the western, in the final shoot-out between the good guys and the bad that briefly transforms the State Science Institute into the OK Corral. It also employs the formal conventions of the epic, in matters small and large. In true epic fashion, the novel features extended formal speeches, such as Francisco's speech on money or Galt's radio address. Its scope is vast, and its heroes, all of imposing stature, perform deeds of great valor in their quest to create no less than a new world. The skill involved in marshalling all these forms and combining them successfully in a single work is enormous, and watching Rand pull it off is a great part of the fun.

My fourth piece of advice, then, is to pay attention to the conventions, and I have dwelled at length on this aspect of literary reading because our awareness of conventions contributes to our pleasure in the writer's artistry and enables us to experience the novel's meaning in the very process of that meaning's unfolding. My final piece of advice also deals with the shape of things and their meanings. It is this: As you're reading a novel, pause from time to time to contemplate its structure.

Structure

In the fifth chapter of the final book of Atlas Shrugged, each of the four sections begins with the announcement that a piece of copper wire has broken. Such a structuring motif is an overt sign that the novelist has worked not only to tell us the story but to shape it in an artful way. That motif sent me back to the chapter as a whole, to look more closely at the way Rand put it together. The chapter is entitled "Their Brothers' Keepers"-another allusion to Genesis, this time to the story of Cain and Abel-and here's what it contains:

In the first section, a piece of copper wire breaks in California. In the course of a conversation with Dagny, James reminds her that he is her brother, a relationship that he assumes strengthens his needy claim on her productive efforts. James and Dagny then hear the news that D'Anconia Copper has just been blown off the face of the earth. The section ends when Rearden and Dagny have dinner together, speak of Francisco, and then read on the calendar Francisco's message: "Brother, you asked for it."

In the second section, a piece of copper wire breaks in Montana. Philip Rearden shows up at the mill and asks Rearden to give him a job, because Philip is his brother and wants one. In the middle of this section, we learn of the divorce proceedings between Rearden and Lillian. The section ends with a scene between Rearden and the Wet Nurse, in which the Wet Nurse asks Rearden for any job at the mill, no matter how lowly, so that he no longer has to perform the duties he hates and no longer has to obstruct the productive activity he has come to respect.

By this point, it's clear that Rand has chosen the chapter's title with care. In Genesis, after Cain kills Abel, the Lord asks Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" And Cain answers: "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" The implicit answer to this question in Genesis, of course, is a resounding "yes." In Atlas Shrugged, by contrast, the answer is an equally resounding "no." Two brothers, James and Philip, in effect ask their respective siblings to keep them, to make possible for them what they cannot make possible for themselves. Dagny and Rearden properly refuse.

But Rand makes clear that "brother" has a fuller meaning than James and Philip can recognize. Francisco's message on the calendar, "Brother, you asked for it," is a piece of mockery prefaced by a colloquial use of "brother." But it is also a personal message from Francisco to his "brother" Rearden, which Rearden understands and greets with uncharacteristic, full-bodied laughter. Here is dramatic evidence of Francisco's vow that he is indeed Rearden's friend; the destruction of D'Anconia Copper is, as he realizes, "an act in [his] defense." In the second section, this extended sense of "brother" also animates Rearden's conversation with the Wet Nurse, whose request for a real job demonstrates his understanding of a tie deeper to Rearden than that of watchdog to the one watched.

The third section of the chapter begins with the breaking of a copper wire in Minnesota, and proceeds to describe the disaster that occurs when a rich harvest of wheat for a hungry nation rots because Cuffy Meigs has re-routed trains to Louisiana to carry Kip's Ma's premature harvest of soybeans to California. In this section, Rand seems to have suspended her exploration of "brotherhood" and its meanings. At least, the word nowhere occurs.

In the final section, a piece of copper wire breaks in New York, while Dagny is at dinner with the Gang of Six who have appointed themselves not only their brothers', but the nation's, keepers. In a devastating series of statements by members of the Gang, Rand indicates what being one's brother's keeper means to a looter. For example, Cuffy Meigs demonstrates that, at least for him, brotherhood has nothing to do with anything; it's keeping that matters. As he says, "Oh hell, are you going to let. . . the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?. . . You've got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there." This section and the chapter end with Dagny's and Galt's love-making beside the tracks of her railroad.

What it means and does not mean to be one's brother's keeper is overt in the first two sections, brutally extended in meaning in the fourth. But how is the third section, about the Minnesota crisis, linked to the structure and thematic significance of the rest of the chapter? Here, the thematic connections are less direct, but more telling. In section one, Rearden tells Dagny that he is illegally diverting every possible scrap of Rearden Metal to the Minnesota farmers who need it to hold their machines together to harvest and transport their wheat. He acts out of the rational, benevolent desire to assist those who feel about their work the proud urgency that Rearden himself feels. As he says to Dagny:

You should have seen those farmers in Minnesota. They've been spending more time fixing old tractors that can't be fixed than plowing their fields. I don't know how they managed to survive till last spring. I don't know how they managed to plant their wheat. But they did. They did.

The narrator goes on to observe: "There was a look of intensity on his face, as if he were contemplating a rare, forgotten sight: a vision of men-and [Dagny] knew what motive was still holding him to his job." In the third section, animated by the same impulse as Rearden, Dagny works around the clock to meet the crisis in Minnesota by redirecting every spare train car to that site. The two of them are aiding their "brothers" in the extended sense that Francisco's message to Rearden and Rearden's exchange with the Wet Nurse have suggested.

But as Galt tells Dagny in the final section, after their love-making, such actions make Dagny, and by extension, Rearden, his enemy-not "in mind," but "in fact." In their struggles to keep productive the few producers who are left, they too act as their brothers' keepers, answering in the affirmative Cain's question in Genesis. But in a paradox that Dagny does not yet fully appreciate, she and Rearden are harming those they would help by postponing the full effects of the strike, delaying the inevitable collapse of a corrupt system. They are failing to recognize that in the world Galt and the strikers are working to bring into being, their true brothers-not James and Philip, but the creators and producers they admire-will not need to be "kept" or kept going at all.

A reader alert to the structure of this chapter, in short, will pause to tease out the thematic significance that the structure supports. Meaning lies, that is, not only in the words on the page but in the writer's patterning of events and in the contrasts and parallels that the patterning suggests. Observing the structure of Rand's novels-within scenes, sections, chapters; within parts; and finally within the novel as a whole-reveals the completeness of their integration, turning that abstract aesthetic category into part of the reader's lived experience of the work.

So how should one read a novel? I've tried to suggest that works of literary art contain enormous riches in their language, detail, conventions, and structure. These literary elements cooperate with plot, characterization, and theme to express the novel's plural, layered, and intricate meanings. So the short answer to the question, "How should one read a novel?" is this: Slowly at first, attentively throughout, and then again and again. When we read in this fashion, we will enjoy reading and re-reading all the novels we love, taking delighted journeys through the complex and fascinating worlds they place in the palms of our hands.