The "Mysterious Strengths" of the Novel

One great reason to read literary criticism is that often the writer fills you in on a specific author, their major works, and then adds some nifty insights into the writing process as well. Jonathan Franzen does this in the New Yorker (Febraury 13 & 20, 2012 edition) on Edith Wharton. It's not the best criticism/literary article I've ever read, but there are some great insights on the novel and fiction writing, for instance:

"One of the mysterious strengths of the novel as an art form, from Balzac forward, is how readily readers connect with the financial anxieties of fictional characters . . . Money, in novels, is such a potent reality principle that the need for it can override even our wish for a character to live happily ever after, and Wharton, throughout the book (The House of Mirth), applies the principle with characteristic relentlessness, tightening the financial screws on Lily as if the author were in league with nature at its most unforgiving."

And this:

"But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction–and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art for–is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of “bad” people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless to make that desire my own."