How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary Form (2008) is a nonfiction educational guide by Thomas C. Foster. Spanning multiple time periods and works, the book aims to show readers a fun, meaningful way to analyze novels. Foster, a literature and creative writing professor, explores the genre’s history, demystifies complex literary concepts, and provides a framework to understand a novel’s structural elements. Shedding light on themes such as the novel’s enduring appeal, Foster positions readers as the real heroes of literature since their active involvement keeps novels edgy, alive, and thriving.

Foster is professor emeritus at the University of Flint, Michigan, where he taught creative writing and literature for nearly 30 years. Foster has authored several books, such as Twenty-five Books That Shaped America (2011) and How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2003).

This guide refers to the Harper Collins e-book edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide features depictions of child sexual abuse and racism. 

Summary

In his second book of pedagogical nonfiction after How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster shows readers useful tools to analyze the novel, the world’s most popular literary form. To establish why a separate “how-to” guide on the novel is helpful, Foster begins with an overview of the genre’s distinct elements and history. He shows how the novel’s length and ambition require different tools than poetry and drama do—tools that equip readers to identify elements like choice of narrator, multiple points of view, and world-building. Knowing the genre’s history reveals how changes in technology, culture, and above all, the tastes of the reading audience have influenced the development of the novel. Thus, a survey of the novel’s history places readers at the center of the artistic enterprise.

Foster discusses the Victorian novel as an example of how socioeconomic context and reading audience shape the genre. Victorian novelists like Charles Dickens and George Eliot sold their novels to journals, which published them in monthly serial installments. The story and characters needed to generate enough interest that readers would await the next installment, which is why the Victorian novel used cliffhangers, memorable characters, and happy endings. Although the Victorian novel gave way to Modernist and Postmodernist fiction in literary circles, most contemporary genre fiction, from detective novels to the Harry Potter series, follows the format perfected in the 19th century.

Despite the popularity of the Victorian form, writers rebelled against its conventions at the turn of the 20th century. This rebellion reflected the world’s massive changes in technology and culture, the greatest of which was how the human mind was perceived. Almost overnight, the concept of the psyche (with its multiple layers and voices) gained currency. In literature, the focus shifted from the outward plot to the inner life of characters, giving rise to the stream-of-consciousness narrative style that writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce perfected. Foster emphasizes that while not all fiction since then is written entirely in the stream-of-consciousness style, most contemporary novels contain portions of characters’ interior dialogue. In addition, the Modernist novel forever changed the genre through other innovations, such as nonchronological time, wordplay, and an ambiguous narrator.

Despite the novel’s radical shifts during the early 20th century, by the 1960s, critics like John Barth argued that the novel was dying as an art form, its possibilities exhausted. However, just as this death knell sounded, two developments in literary fiction helped resurrect the genre. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles was an exercise in metafiction, which deliberately draws attention to its artifice, while One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez revealed the possibilities of magical realism, wherein fantasy coexists with grounded reality. The postcolonial novel, in which writers attempt to articulate a radical identity, gave the form even more energy. Writers from historically marginalized groups have since adapted various storytelling techniques, such as cyclical time and conventions from oral narratives, to express a composite story. All these developments continue to take the novel along exciting paths.

After unpacking historical and cultural context as a useful literary analysis tool, Foster turns to structural elements. Close reading (or engaged, active reading) that identifies these elements and explores their purpose is essential to understanding a novel. Foster suggests that close reading is an act of not only consumption but also creation. A writer’s job is done when they submit the novel for publication; readers create further meaning by interacting with it. Foster presents ways to extract meaning from a novel. A close reading of just the opening sentence and first page can reveal as many as 18 structural elements, from point of view to diction to overall tone. Since a book’s first pages are the hook that engages readers, writers pay special attention to the opening of a novel.

Foster next examines choice of narrator, narrative voice, and character as keys to a novel’s meanings. Exploring the many narrative perspectives a novel can use, he focuses on why many contemporary novels use a character’s point of view rather than a third-person omniscient perspective. A character’s limited perspective aligns with contemporary readers’ comfort with ambiguity and creates mystery and tension in the plot. Since narrative perspective and voice are easy to confuse, Foster clarifies that voice refers to the tone in which a character tells a story. Additionally, he unpacks how the first-person narrator is a red flag in fiction: First-person narrators are typically hiding something, willingly or otherwise. Their authentic earnestness usually results from naivete, childishness, or a combination of more complex things. Foster provides useful tips on how to understand characters through their choice of words, diction, and character emblems, or objects they emphasize that help reveal their inner reality.

Zooming in on smaller structural units like chapters, sentences, and words, Foster shows how these elements build a novel’s larger structure. A chapter’s flow is a microcosm of the overall story’s flow, while authors’ word choices help unlock their writing style. Some writers, like Ernest Hemingway, use words sparingly so that the subtext does all the talking, while others, like William Faulkner, write beautiful, elaborate sentences. Each of these choices inextricably links to the narrative’s demands.

Foster often reminds readers of the fictitious nature of novels. A novel may closely follow to the writer’s own life, be full of convincing characters, or use an identifiable first-person narrator, but a novel is always a construct. Emphasizing its artifice helps readers examine it critically. In addition, Foster argues that a novel’s artifice works not because it resonates with readers’ reality but because it is logically consistent with its own reality. The enduring appeal of fantastic works such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy illustrates the importance of logical world-building in fiction. Foster questions the premise that readers relate best to characters and plots that align with their own circumstances. If this were true, readers would not identify with Frodo, the hobbit protagonist of Tolkien’s works. Frodo resonates with readers emotionally rather than via circumstance.

Like the presumption that easily relatable characters are more engaging, presumptions exist about the ideal, or “Ur,” novel. Foster suggests that intelligent literary analysis requires challenging one’s own biases about the novel’s perfect form. The form to which readers cling—the Victorian novel, featuring linear time and clear chapters—is not the first form of the novel. Foster shows how early novels like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) were far more experimental. Contemporary novels that play with structure—sometimes organized as a series of short stories or as one story from different points of view—use the experimental possibilities that have always been present in the genre.

Another way to create more meaning is to recognize how a novel “echoes” or alludes to other literary works. Foster shows how visualizing novels as interconnected with other novels and artforms can lead to a never-ending journey of exploration. Finally, he turns to how novels conclude, which is just as important in literary analysis as how they begin. The contemporary literary novel often has an “untidy ending” (264), or ambiguous resolution, revealing something important about contemporary society: People accept ambiguous endings because they understand that reality is messy and eludes definitions. Whether its ending is tidy or untidy, any novel examines what it means to be human. Because human existence is its subject, the novel remains the most enduring literary form.