How to Read a Novel

In answer to the question, "How should one read a novel?" I could tell you this: Begin with the first word on the first page, and continue reading from left to right, straight down the page, until the words run out. Then turn the page or move to the top of the facing page, and repeat this procedure until you come, a few or several hundred pages later, to the words 'The End.' Then you're done.

The problem with this guidance is that we read almost everything in the fashion I've described, including newspaper columns and magazine articles, internet postings, how-to books, and those instructions for assembly that claim to be foolproof, but aren't. My mock-advice doesn't take into account how literary texts differ from these other kinds of texts. The difference, of course, accounts for a great deal, including the greater pleasure we take in reading a novel than a grocery list.

Literary writing differs from everyday writing in at least in two ways: its purposes are multiple and complex, and its artistry is among its most striking characteristics. I can illustrate what I mean by presenting you with instances from opposite ends of the spectrum of writing: what we do when we write a list of the people we want to invite to a party versus what Shakespeare was doing when he wrote, say, King Lear. When we write a list of party guests, our purpose is simple: Out of the class of the people we know, we're singling out the subclass of those with whom we'd like to share a celebratory occasion. The social or diplomatic artistry involved in this selection may be great indeed, but the degree of literary artistry involved is zero. All we're aiming for is a one-to-one correspondence between the people we want to invite and the names that appear on the list.

The situation is far different when we speculate about Shakespeare's purposes in writing a play. Some of those purposes were practical. His membership in his theater company depended, it appears, on his writing at least two plays a year. His income and the reputation of his company hinged on his production. He had also to write plays that his all-male company could reasonably perform, plays suited to their particular talents as actors.

Some of his purposes were undoubtedly personal. He was a man with an extraordinary gift and presumably felt the urgency of that gift to be put to use. He was passionately engaged by words and wanted to exploit their evocative riches. By his own testimony in the sonnets, he wished to achieve fame, indeed immortality, by creating works of beauty and power. And if we're to believe the Oscar-winning film, Shakespeare in Love, Shakespeare also knew that a successful playwright could attract women who look like Gwyneth Paltrow.

Some of his purposes were moral or philosophical. Shakespeare was, by all accounts and by the evidence of his plays, an unusually close and careful observer of his fellow men. He wrote to express in dramatic form his knowledge of human nature and experience. Each play explores a facet of that wealth of observation and sympathy. In King Lear, for instance, he dramatized how folly can unleash evil; how evil can unhinge the world and send it careening into chaos; how the things we properly value, such as love, reason, riches, wisdom, even eyesight, can be rendered ineffective or even be crushed in the process; and how fleeting, though precious, is the consolation of genuine love and forgiveness.

The work that is likely to result from the combination and realization of these complex, multiple purposes is light years beyond the party list. So too is the artistry. To render the nightmare vision that King Lear presents would not have been possible even for Shakespeare before his mastery of his craft reached its long zenith in the first years of the seventeenth century. The knowledge of stagecraft, the command of the language and its poetic resources, the sheer courage involved in entering imaginatively into the minds and hearts of characters in extremis are as awe-inspiring as is the play itself.

This contrast between the simple list and the complex work of art, I hope, indicates how and why literary writing differs from everyday writing. That difference carries over to literary reading. Our reading of literary works differs from our reading of the newspaper, say, because we are aware, if only subliminally, of the author's multiple purposes and aware, often quite immediately and powerfully, of the artistry involved in realizing them. Of the kinds of literary art, the novel is certainly the most popular. By many multiples, more novels are purchased and read in a single year than are all the other forms combined, including plays, poems, essays, and literary non-fiction. That fact suggests that as readers of novels we generally feel ourselves competent to the task, perfectly able to follow the development of the plot, to decide which characters we admire and don't admire, and to trace the novel's themes. We don't need instruction in reading a novel any more than we need advice on getting dressed in the morning or brushing our hair. After all, most of us have happily been reading novels ever since we first experienced the peculiar joys of The Cat in the Hat.

My response to this view is that 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 close and 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. 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. I'll be drawing my illustrations from Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but the principles I'll be concerned with apply to all novels.

Orienting Ourselves

My first suggestion is to read the opening pages of a novel slowly, 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 microcosm 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 his 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 opening pages alert a careful reader to several things, the full significance of which will emerge only later. 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, and 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" (3).¹ 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 (5). 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 (3).

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" (6). 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, and at this point mysterious, figure he is.

The opening of Atlas Shrugged, like the opening of The Fountainhead, presents a lone man moving purposefully through a landscape into a building. But here, the landscape is urban, the man on whom we focus lacks Roark's disturbing power, and the building he enters is the imposing headquarters of a major American railroad. The novel begins not with laughter, but with a question, "Who is John Galt?" (3).² And if we're reading carefully, we notice that the questions multiply, for both the solitary Eddie Willers and for us, as the opening pages unfold. Eddie questions his own unease and apprehensiveness; wonders why the sight of the city, with its empty storefronts and untended buildings, so disturbs him; and wonders why he suddenly remembers a pair of events from his youth. Something is gravely wrong with the world to which we're introduced, but the source of that wrong is unclear both to Eddie and to us.

His brief contact with the bum who poses the initial question only deepens the mystery. Who is John Galt? What, if anything, has he to do with this scene or with Eddie or with the dread he feels? Why is it that we share Eddie's sense of relief when he enters the headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental, a place that seems exempt from the decay all around it? These pages, in short, are full of questions and half-revealed meanings. The implicit promise of the long narrative ahead is that it will answer those questions and uncover those meanings — and that these tasks require an epic narrative for their accomplishment.

A careful reader may notice more than the multiplying mysteries of these first pages. Certain objects, present to Eddie's sight or recovered in memory, fitfully illuminate the narrative just as the lampposts light the darkening street on which Eddie walks: a calendar, a vegetable pushcart that prompts Eddie's wish to protect it, the marble floors and well-lit hallways of Taggart Transcontinental. One in particular occupies his attention for five full paragraphs: the blasted oak tree on the hill at the Taggart estate. We learn that it had once seemed to Eddie "his greatest symbol of strength" (5), but that he had discovered, after lightning struck it and revealed it hollowness, that its "living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it" (5).

Later events in the narrative make vivid the full symbolic meaning of the tree, which not even the most deliberate reader can intuit at this point. But the reader can see the narrator's care to highlight this symbol, first by dwelling on it at such length, then by thoroughly explicating its significance to Eddie, and then by shrouding even this brief moment of clarity in a mystery of its own. We learn that Eddie responded to the sight of the "black tunnel" of the trunk by feeling an "immense betrayal" (5), but of what he has never been sure. Disillusionment or insecurity might seem the more predictable response of a seven-year-old; betrayal, particularly a nameless one, seems odd. The narrator's mention of "betrayal" in this puzzling context alerts a careful reader to watch for this theme. What does "betrayal" mean in this novel? What forms will it take? Who will betray whom?

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 — and once again at ease between the water below and the sky above.

Atlas Shrugged also recalls its beginning at its close, but here we're struck by difference, not similarity. Galt and Dagny stand atop a mountain in Galt's Gulch, imagining in the darkness the ruined world that Eddie had indistinctly apprehended on that first September 2nd. But Galt and Dagny regard "the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail" without Eddie's pain or fear (1168). For by now, the causes that Eddie struggled in vain to grasp have played out their full effects, and Galt and his strikers have stopped the motor of the world. Now, the opening symbol of the blasted oak, whose roots only seemed to clutch the hill "like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil" (5), has been replaced by another symbol, the "defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt's Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished" (1168). That is, the oak, which Eddie discovered to be an empty shape without life, yields to the inexhaustible energy of the shapeless flame, the energy that the strikers will harness to shape to a new world.

Learning the Language

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 do so 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 the colors of its paint 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?" "Yes?" "Yes?" "Well?" "Thank you," "I don't know," and "Today? Oh yes" (5-6). 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. (103)

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? It seems to me that we would do so only if we were attached to the gain, comfort, and self-gratification Toohey disparages — and would prefer not to get soaked. 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?" (722). 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" (663).

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. Readers eager to enhance their pleasure in reading pay attention to the words.

Attending to the 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. Trained readers of literary fiction notice details in the same way that baseball fans notice how Mike Piazza adjusts his stance at the plate in relation to the particular strengths of the pitcher he faces. 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.

Rand rewards the attention we pay, even in the smallest details. For instance, Atlas Shrugged 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 this passage to illustrate one way in which Rand's details matter:

The snowstorm that came at the end of January blocked the passes through the Rocky Mountains, raising white walls thirty feet high across the main-line track of Taggart Transcontinental. The men who attempted to clear the track, gave up within the first few hours: the rotary plows broke down, one after another. The plows had been kept in precarious repair for two years past the span of their usefulness. The new plows had not been delivered; the manufacturer had quit, unable to obtain the steel he needed from Orren Boyle.

Three westbound trains were trapped on the sidings of Winston Station, high in the Rockies, where the main line of Taggart Transcontinental cut across the northwest corner of Colorado. For five days, they remained beyond the reach of help. Trains could not approach them through the storm. The last of the trucks made by Lawrence Hammond broke down on the frozen grades of the mountain highways. The best of the airplanes once made by Dwight Sanders were sent out, but never reached Winston Station; they were worn past the stage of fighting a storm.

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." (497-98)

The passage opens by contrasting nature's destructive efficacy and the inefficacy of the man-made means of controlling nature. Plows, trains, trucks, and planes have been rendered useless. 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 paragraph 3, 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 — out of the unformed void, out of the darkness upon the face of the deep — 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, 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.

I have long thought that the "Account Overdrawn" chapter in which this passage appears contains Rand's best descriptive writing. When this particular passage seized my attention, I paused in my reading to reread it, to figure out why it had seized me. I noticed first the reference to "the void," "the lightless earth," "the starless sky." And then I noticed the emphasis on the days and that there are six of them. Bertram Scudder's reference to "an act of God" clinched the allusion to Genesis for me. And then I paused again to tip my hat to Rand's artistry. Einstein once observed that God is in the details. My third piece of advice is meant to suggest that the pleasure of reading lies there, too.

Observing the 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 or her disposal. Here's what I mean: No writer undertakes the work of writing as if he or she were a blank slate, ignorant of other writing. As a boy, for instance, Shakespeare certainly watched touring troupes of actors performing plays; he may even have participated in theatricals in Stratford to celebrate a religious holiday or honor a townsman's achievement. As an apprentice playwright in London, he spent his days in the company of actors and playwrights and learned the conventions of the stage and its plays by watching their work. It is certainly the case that he recognized among his companions the unconventional genius of Christopher Marlowe and spent his apprenticeship studying every line of blank verse Marlowe ever wrote. The fullness of that experience of other plays informed Shakespeare's own work and inspired a career spent using, extending, and transforming the conventions established by his predecessors.

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. Our experience as readers, in fact, makes us expect certain things of the book we've just pulled from the shelf. If I've selected a murder mystery, I expect the writer to play by the rules — that is, to honor the conventions of this particular form. There must be a murder. The circumstances of the murder must implicate more than one suspect, preferably several. There must be a detective. If he or she is an amateur rather than a member of the police force, so much the better. If he or she has a British accent and is slightly or seriously eccentric, better still. I must not be able to guess correctly the identity of the murderer. I want very much, in fact, to be skillfully misled by intriguing red herrings. The detective must solve the murder, and I must be able to review the evidence and kick myself for not having recognized all the clues and put them together properly. If these conventions are honored, I will consider my time well spent. If they are not honored, I will feel cheated and will never again pick up another mystery by the same author.

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 in which a gala party takes place. Novelists love these occasions because they offer an opportunity to bring all the characters together in one place and to show them interacting in ways that ordinary life seldom offers. Such scenes in nineteenth-century fiction are especially interesting because the formality and splendor of the party impose certain constraints on the characters who attend. It is bad form to get drunk, for instance; it is rude to refuse to dance, especially if you are a man and the women in attendance lack partners; it is unacceptable for a man or a woman to address a stranger without a proper introduction.

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 know but not like each other, and something happens at this ball to transform their antipathy into love. 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. In short, fancy parties in fiction, and sometimes even in life, are about sex. Jane Austen knew this when she brought Elizabeth and Darcy together on such an occasion; Tolstoy knew this when Anna Karenina and Vronsky begin their descent into tragedy during a quadrille.

Ayn Rand knew this, too. Indeed, Dagny's mother is explicit about the sexual element of the ball she arranges for Dagny's debut. As she watches her daughter enter the ballroom, she thinks, "Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this — thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling — was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity" (103). Rand's evocation of the real meaning of the ball and its purpose is no accident. And having given us this party, in which Dagny's expectations remain sadly unmet, she goes on to give us another, the Reardens' anniversary celebration, which 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 fully conscious intention of seeing Hank outside the context of their offices, in something other than the business suits they usually wear. 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. Just as she was at her coming-out ball, though, Dagny is again 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.

But even though Dagny's hopes are sadly dashed, 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. Rearden watches him enter, pause, "then walk into the crowd as if he owned the room which he had never entered before. Heads turned to watch him, as if he pulled them on strings in his wake" (140). The subsequent 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 friendship as significant to the novel's meaning as is Dagny's and Rearden's eventual affair.

As I've already suggested in my reference to murder mysteries, an author's use of convention extends beyond isolated scenes to the form of the work itself. Our knowledge of formal conventions has an enormous impact on our experience of any given work. We know, for instance, that in a romantic comedy, the boy will meet the girl, lose the girl, and get the girl again. We know that in a dramatic tragedy, the protagonist will not survive the final act. We know that in a thriller, the hero will succeed in his dangerous quest only after facing and surmounting seemingly impossible odds and only after doing so at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute. These formal conventions allow us, with reasonable certainty, not only to predict the outcome of events, but to apprehend their significance as they occur and 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 shootout 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.

The formal conventions of The Fountainhead demonstrate in surprising and intriguing ways the connection in a literary work between form and meaning. The form in which this novel most clearly participates is the classic coming-of-age novel, in which the young hero or heroine confronts the world, suffers painful reverses, discovers himself or herself in the process, achieves much or little (depending on the author's sense of life), and is tempered by the experience, perhaps even made wise. The Fountainhead certainly looks at the outset as if it participated in this genre. Roark is a very young man when we meet him, at the outset of a career that has already experienced the setback of his expulsion. And he goes on to experience even more grievous reverses.

But unlike other heroes in this form, Roark is not transformed by his experience. Rand complicates the form she seems to have adopted by giving us a young man who is already fully formed, confidently and unfailingly committed to the principles he has long since chosen. While it is true that Roark, like the heroes of other coming-of-age novels, learns a great deal, what he learns is quite specific and particular: he learns who his friends are; he develops the skill of recognizing which clients are likely to accept his terms and employ him. His principles, indeed the man himself, remain unchanged — a fact that accounts, I think, for Rand's decision to recall in the novel's closing image the image with which it began.

That The Fountainhead is a coming-of-age novel with a difference helps us see what the novel means. Rand takes what the form of her novel suggests should have been Roark's coming of age and transforms it into the coming of age of characters with whom he interacts, regardless of their chronological years. Peter Keating, Dominique Francon, and Gail Wynand are all transformed by the very fact of Roark and their experience of him, as if he, not the world, were the school of hard knocks in which they must learn their lessons. Keating emerges from this school no longer able to shield himself effectively from his own emptiness; Wynand emerges knowing that he does not possess a spirit like Roark's, although he might have done so. Only Dominique emerges the happier, no longer afraid of the world and no longer bent on destroying what she loves before the world has the chance to sully it. A reader unaware of the formal convention that Rand so expertly employs and transforms here may see at the end what I have just described — the varying circumstances of Keating, Wynand, and Dominique. A reader aware of the formal convention gains the enormous pleasure of watching that end take shape almost from the novel's opening moments.

My fourth piece of advice, then, is to pay attention to the conventions, to bring to bear on the new book in your hand the wealth of your experience as a reader. I have dwelled at such 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.

Contemplating the Structure

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. Each of the four sections of Chapter 5 of the final book of Atlas Shrugged, for instance, begins with the narrator's matter-of-fact announcement that a piece of copper wire has broken. An event that would once have been unremarkable has become by this point in the nation's industrial decline a crisis to which no long-term resolution is possible, because these wires break in the same chapter in which Francisco completes the destruction of D'Anconia Copper. This structuring motif is particularly elegant here because, having learned by this point what the strike means, we more fully understand what the narrator's announcements mean: The country is declining, but the strike to which we have allied ourselves, rationally and emotionally, is succeeding.

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!" (925).

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, for no better reason than that 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?" (4:9).2 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 ever recognize. Francisco's message on the calendar, "Brother, you asked for it," initially seems piece of mockery prefaced by a colloquial use of "brother," as in "Oh, 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 Rearden realizes, "an act in [his] defense" (921). 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 their former connection allowed, when the Wet Nurse was the watchdog and Rearden 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 wheat harvest rots because Cuffy Meigs has re-routed trains to carry Kip's Ma's unripened 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 looters who have appointed themselves not only their brothers', but the nation's, keepers. In a devastating series of statements by members of this gang, Rand indicates what being one's brother's keeper means to a looter. Eugene Lawson, for instance, solemnly observes, "It's a great responsibility. . . to hold the decision of life or death over thousands of people and to sacrifice them when necessary, but we must have the courage to do it" (945). A page later, 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" (947). 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 admiration, 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" (923). 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" (923). 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" (961). 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. In the chapter we've just been considering, for instance, Rearden's divorce from Lillian is balanced by Galt's sexual union with Dagny. 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 "integration," an abstract aesthetic category, into part of the reader's lived experience of the work.

So how should one read a novel? The short answer to this question is certainly not the one I proposed at the outset. 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.

¹ Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943; rptd. Scribners, 1986).

² The Holy Bible, Authorized Version (Philadelphia: The National Bible Press, 1970).

Dr. Susan McCloskey earned her Ph. D. in English literature at Princeton University and was a tenured member of the English department and director of the humanities program at Vassar College. Her essays on classic and contemporary theater have appeared in newspapers and journals, and her articles on writing are featured in the New York State Bar Journal. Dr. Dr. McCloskey is president of McCloskey Writing Consultants, which provides a complete range of writing instruction and editorial services to major law firms, Fortune 500 corporations, and private clients across the nation.