A Novel Idea: Read More Fiction

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The best writers don’t only keep you engaged with a gripping tale. They will, under the guise of that compelling narrative, teach you more about human motivation that lies at the base of everything in politics, business and life itself.

Fiction engages the emotions as well as the intellect in a way very little nonfiction can. The ease with which stories become embedded in the memory also gives a novelist the edge. We are much more likely to remember a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end than a list of valuable instructions. While I can barely remember a page from my undergraduate textbooks, I can still recount stories I learned as a child.

The good novel exploits the virtues of storytelling to capture a truth. I doubt there is as good a nonfiction book that conveys the reality of the life, economics and politics of New York in the 1980s as well as Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You can read as many guides to living your best life as you wish, but I defy you to find a better account of the travails of love, happiness, faith and morals as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” Histories of the Cold War are fine, but nothing portrays the moral ambiguities and complexities of geopolitics as effectively as John le Carré’s novels of the age. (Though not his later ones, where the espionage-era paranoia that had entered his soul descended into generic anti-Western, anticapitalist tropes as tiresome as any critical theory textbook.) Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” is as good a portrait of 20th-century American capitalism as any economics treatise. If you think you’ve only just discovered technology’s corrosive effect on the human spirit, read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” from 1932.

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