Why do we read novels? To be entertained and distracted, for sure, but also to learn about lives other than our own. And not just to learn: to understand, as fully as we can, what it would feel like to be another person in a place we’ve never lived, in the past, on another planet. It’s a kind of miracle we’ve come to take for granted.
When it is said that a work of non-fiction reads “like a novel”, the element of praise – for its gripping storytelling or larger-than-life subject – masks a kind of disparagement: it implies some suspicion of the form, as if the fantastical or false inheres in the novel when in fact the opposite is the case. Novels, certainly the greatest novels, are wholly true because nothing exists outside their frame.
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