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Her latest book, the essay collection “The Questions That Matter Most,” assembles pieces on a range of topics: motherhood, childhood and, naturally, novels. (The title refers to an essay about how women in literature navigate love and virtue — or, more often, struggle to do so.) “As a reader, and as a writer, I love images and sentences that are so striking that you remember and cherish them,” she writes. “To me, that’s the essence of the novel: the tension between wanting to linger in appreciation of an individual line and wanting to see what happens next. You must move on, if you’re ever going to finish the book … and yet certain details capture you, slow you, ask you to pause. It’s because of this experience that I love novels most among the art forms.” She goes on to discuss inspirations including Willa Cather, “Little Women” and Nancy Mitford; the book also includes her riffs on “Othello” (in which the 16th-century writer Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, gives Desdemona some relationship tips) and “The Metamorphosis” (with a happy ending).
In a video interview from her home in Carmel Valley, Calif., Smiley, 73, discussed the endurance of human writing in the age of artificial intelligence, writing fiction as a mother and her thoughts on retirement. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q: In the essay “The Most Important Question,” you argue that the novel can’t be replaced by television and film. Is the novelist more threatened today by prestige TV and AI?
A: If everybody says that in five years the only books we’re accepting are AI-generated, I’ll keep writing them anyway. The reason we read novels and nonfiction is that we want to get acquainted with the individuality and the opinions of other people, and I don’t see how AI can do that. It would be fake.
Let’s go back to Jane Austen. Jane Austen was a really interesting woman with a great sense of humor and a lot of insights — and in some ways for her time a very unusual life. And so the pleasures of “Pride and Prejudice” and “Persuasion” that draw you in are that you understand her idiosyncratic point of view and that you also understand the world that she lives in. And that’s an incredible pleasure. Is AI going to write another version of “Ulysses”? Possibly, but it won’t have any significance.
Q: In the book, you say that the novelist is always working in a time of turmoil. What’s involved in writing about turmoil?
A: If you’re writing a novel about turmoil, then you’re writing to make sense of the turmoil. As you think about the turmoil and turn it into a plot, you turn it into a logical analysis of what you see is going on. And then you add the characters and turn it into a story. The thing about the novel is you have to make the logic complete in order for the story to work. The difference in nonfiction is that you’re giving your opinion, and there’s plenty of stuff you don’t know.
Q: How did you come to write the essay about the absence of mothers in fiction, “Can Mothers Think?”
A: When I was pregnant for the second time, it struck me that the experiences of women in fiction as women — including pregnancy but also other things — weren’t very common. That’s true even in books written by Jane Austen or George Eliot. They had female points of view. But Austen and Eliot, as far as we know, never experienced pregnancy. They delved into the romance bit of it, but they didn’t delve into those other things that you have to do as a woman, especially if you don’t have a servant. The lucky part was that I was living in Ames [Iowa], and I had access to great child care. And my house wasn’t that far from the school. So I could set aside an hour and a half or two hours a day and actually write something. Which is a real privilege, especially for someone who doesn’t have servants.
Q: What do you make of the current wave of book bans in schools?
A: Totally idiotic. As soon as you say, “Don’t do this” or “Don’t do that,” pretty soon your kid is up on the roof smoking a cigarette they stole out of your backpack. That’s just the way kids are. The more books that you ban, the more things you tell the child to sneak around looking for. Whereas if, for example, the book wasn’t banned, but it was assigned, that’s when the child might not read it. Children need to read a whole lot of different points of view to understand their own point of view. And as they read all those other points of view, their own ideas about things form themselves.
Q: Perhaps the best-known piece in this book is your 1996 Harper’s essay, “Say It Ain’t So, Huck,” where you call “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” overrated and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” underrated. Do you think the novels are perceived differently now?
A: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” gets tons of four-and-a-half or five-star reviews. So it looks to me as though more people are reading it. They appreciate it. They understand what [Harriet Beecher] Stowe is getting at, and I think that’s a good thing. But I don’t want to get rid of “Huck Finn.” I want people to read them both and see the difference between them.
The saddest thing about “Huck Finn,” and I think Mark Twain would have agreed with this, is that as Huck and Jim go down the river, Huck can’t focus on what might happen to Jim. So Jim becomes a sidelined character. I say in the essay that Twain set aside “Huck Finn” because he got confused. I think Stowe knew what she was going to do the whole time. She knew she was going to make Tom a very spiritual, decent person who thinks he is going to be saved, but not until after he dies. And Stowe knew that she was going to make the female characters more independent, both in thinking and acting, than they were usually portrayed as being. To me, there’s two sides of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” There’s the racial side, but there’s also the side of women learning and women being strong and having to escape. I appreciated both of them.
Q: The book includes a brief tribute to Alice Munro on the occasion of her retirement in 2013. Is retirement something you’re thinking about?
A: Not so far. Am I going to retire, or will I be outclassed by AI? I don’t know. But I’ve still got plenty of ideas, and I still want to keep at it.
Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”
The Questions That Matter Most
Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom
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