Discovering Fiction

“Everyone complains that we don’t have any great authors and literary works that could do justice to our contemporary era, [but] this ignores the fact that for a long time our literature has sought merely to describe reality, rather than to actively explore it,” writes novelist Yan (The Four Books) in this savvy work of criticism. Focusing on Western and Chinese literature, Yan argues that fiction deals in four different “levels of truth.” There’s “societally structured truth,” which “develops primarily in centralized states and under strong ideological systems”; “worldly experienced truth” based on shared experience (Margaret Mitchell and William Somerset Maugham are a couple notable practitioners); “life-experienced truth,” which allows authors to “analyze the depth of their corresponding era,” as seen in, for instance, Anna Karenina; and “spiritual-depth truth,” the most sophisticated and, Yan argues, “deepest form of reality”—accomplished by Dostoyevsky. Yan then turns to contemporary literature’s use of “mythorealism,” which “rejects the superficial logical relations that exist in real life to explore a kind of invisible and ‘nonexistent’ truth.” While some readers might find Yan's categories overly simplistic, his framework is precise and well articulated. The result is a thought-provoking look at the state of literature, and how it came to pass. Agent: Laura Susijn, Susjin Agency. (June)

Correction: An earlier version of this review referred to the author by an incorrect surname.