What do the lives and thoughts of other people feel like? We'll never really know, but fiction offers as good an approximation of knowing as we're likely to come across. That absorbing illusion of a world elsewhere, with its promised distraction from the irksomeness of our own reality, has always been the most seductive reason for picking up novels and short stories. But like all pleasurable diversions, it has to be paid for. The practice of narrative has a hard history of moral ambition, and is as much concerned with what people ought to be as with what they are. Writers tend to agree that the two conditions rarely coincide. There isn't a more complete guide to the ubiquity of human failure, cruelty and stupidity than the one you'll find sitting on the fiction shelves of any bookshop. No matter how exotic their settings, or bizarre the doings of their characters, the lessons of novelists follow disconcertingly familiar patterns. The cumulative implications are clear: people's lives have more in common than we might like to suppose.

LRB 6 July 1989 | PDF Download