The Case for Fiction — Charlie Kerfoot

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.

— George R.R. Martin , A Dance with Dragons

For actionable, ambitious people, it is sometimes thought that reading fiction or traditional literature is a waste of time. It is not worthwhile. If the goal is to learn practical, useful knowledge, one would want to read non-fiction right? Books that are actually relevant, correspond with the real world, and provide advice that is proven to work in the past. Self-help books, Hume’s popular philosophy, and memoirs of famous thinkers or leaders have exploded in popularity, in the age of ambition and productivity. Much of the world has replaced Dante or Dostoevsky with the practical words of Aurelius or James Clear. Life in it’s pursuit of greatness has replaced metaphor with memoir, allegory with advice. It is only when we reflect and reevaluate why we read books at all that we are able to appreciate the value of the narrative.

Reading is the pursuit of knowledge. Plain and simple. Yes, some people get immense pleasure out of reading and some books provide immense pleasure for the reader, yet, in modern times, there will always be something more stimulating, more invigorating. To pick up a book is to, in at least some capacity, acknowledge a desire for knowledge. Knowledge that is, of course, not simply an ends but a means for a better, happier, more fulfilled life. Knowledge, or intellectualism, for its own sake is worthless; it must have some greater impact on your life be it physical, in the real world, or mental, impacting your perspective and overall thought process. It follows that people, in desire of a more fulfilling life, would seek out actionable, practical knowledge. It seems to be the most bang for your buck when understanding knowledge as a means. Texts that spell out what needs to be done concisely and obviously are less work and higher signal than literature that needs to be understood, interpreted, and redirected into one’s own circumstances. Why then am I arguing for the consumption of friction?

Here is an analogy I like to make. I think it is a relatively universal experience to have a favorite musical artist, but not be very fond of their most popular, or few most popular songs. Maybe you don’t dislike the hits (maybe you even think they’re great) but there are deeper cuts, far less popular ones, that you return to far more often. Yet, this is somewhat puzzling. If the artist has better songs, why aren’t they the most popular? Setting aside cognitive bias, I think the answer lies in the song’s individual personalization and the ability for different songs to resonate with different people. Your favorite song is, perhaps, the one with the most meaningful lyrics for you or the one associated with a special memory or maybe just the song that is the most pleasing to your specific ear. It is a lovely quirk of art that individual pieces can create such varying impressions. It is seemingly the case that the most popular song is the one that is no particular person’s favorite but provides broad appeal for all sorts of people. For example, while some may think the less popular song is a 10 and others think it is a 2, everyone tends to agree the hit is somewhere around a 7.

I think the relationship between non-fiction and narrative literature works much the same way ¹ . Non-fiction books will be impactful and provide real insight, but the impact will not vary much from person to person. Plain, actionable advice has the benefit of being almost impossible to misinterpret, but that also means it can not really be reinterpreted or understood in an alternative way. The experience of a novel is practically the opposite.

Every time a novel is read, it is understand in a unique manner. That is the beauty of narrative literature. There is a density and ambiguity that produces some hardship but also results in incredible insight if given the effort and open-mindness. One’s personal experiences, background, and pre-conceived beliefs have a substantial impact on how a novel is read and understood. Frankly, to recommend a novel is to commit a ridiculous act. It is to make massive overarching assumptions about the reader and their own lived life. No two people can ever understand a novel in exactly the same way. In fact, one person can’t even understand the novel the same way on second or third reads. It is a beautiful phenomenon when you return to a novel after years away and form completely new and contradictory opinions throughout the reread. A novel’s ambiguity, in contrast with a non-fiction book’s clarity, allows for insight that isn’t static or constant but varies greatly by person and lived experience.

This is why a great novel grows with you. The book on your shelf at twenty is not the same book at thirty, and certainly not the same at fifty. You, in your second, third, etc. reread, bring different scars, different loves, different defeats. A self-help book read at twenty offers the same lesson at fifty; if anything, it offers less, because by then you have either internalized its advice or rejected it. But a novel, especially the pillars of literature like Anna Karenina or Ulysses, these texts are practically inexhaustible. You read Anna’s story as a young person and see a love affair. Years later, as a parent, you see something different altogether about Levin, about responsibility, about the quiet ordinary work of a life. The book has remained the same. You have grown and changed over years of experience. The novel, generously, makes room for who you have become. This is experience is unattainable when reading non-fiction. A productivity book completed is a productivity book finished. A novel finished is a novel paused.

There is also the simple fact that novels are harder. Novels categorically demand more ² . A good novel is a puzzle, and one without a clear solution or answer key available. The reading requires work; it is almost labor-intensive. You have to hold characters in memory, track motifs, infer what is being said by what is left unsaid, decide what to make of an unreliable narrator or an ambiguous ending. This difficulty is not a bug. It is the core feature. Non-fiction holds your hand, providing clear conclusions. Fiction put forth the requisite materials and asks you, the reader, to build something out of them. The mental muscles developed in fiction, namely patience, ambiguity tolerance, even the capacity to hold contradictory ideas at once or the willingness to sit with something before judging it, are too often forgotten and underdeveloped in a culture optimized for the bullet point or the thirty-second TikTok. To read a difficult novel well is to practice thinking. You can read a hundred articles on critical thinking and still be a worse critical thinker than someone who has actually wrestled with the complexities of Leopold and Molly Bloom’s relationship.

It is also worth noting that fiction was, for most of literary history, the more respected and more lucrative form of writing. The greatest writers to ever live (think Eliot, Joyce, Melville, Steinbeck) chose the novel not because it was easier or required less reflection on the real world, but rather the opposite. It was the form within which serious thoughts about humanity and culture could most fully be expressed. It is not unreasonable to think Goethe could have written a treatise on moral philosophy. Dostoevsky was deeply engaged with the theological and political debates of his time, and his response was The Brothers Karamazov, not a pamphlet. Argument can convince you of a proposition, but only a novel can truly change what kind of person you are. The Victorians read fiction obsessively, paid novelists handsomely, and understood the novel as a serious instrument of moral and intellectual education. It is strange that our modern worldview often pushes us away from the form which attracted the most powerful minds of the last few centuries.

Reading fiction is the closest thing we have to actually living another life. A non-fiction book about empathy can tell you that empathy matters and offer techniques to practice it. A novel makes you feel, for hundreds or even thousands of pages, what it is like to be someone you are not. To be someone of a different gender, a different century, a different class, a different universe altogether with different rules and an alternative ethical framework. You do not learn courage by reading a list of its features and applications. You experience courage as the character experiences it. You are Edmond Dantès, in the relentless pursuit of revenge. You grieve, a little, for someone who never existed, and find that your capacity for grief has been exercised and developed in a way that real life rarely permits (free of cost).

There is value in struggle and friction. You cannot live alongside a character for six hundred pages and come out unchanged as the same exact person. The memory of having read Crime and Punishment is not the memory of a thesis. It is, instead, the memory of having spent weeks inside Raskolnikov’s fevered mind. What you remember, years later, is rarely the witty, concise advice you highlighted in a productivity book. What you remember is George and Lennie on the riverbank, Lear raging on the heath, Stephen on the strand. These are not tooltips that your brain files away as information, often forgotten and replaced again by new productivity hacks. Instead, they are something closer to lived experience. Maybe a borrowed one, but still something that is real and tangible.

So, to the actionable and ambitious, I would offer this: the dichotomy between practical reading and literary reading is false. The novel is both literary and practical. Self-help books are often neither. Memoirs and manuals can tell you what to do; fiction can change who is doing it. And if the goal is, as I argued at the beginning, a better and more fulfilled life then it only follows to pursue the slow, ambiguous, difficult work of reading novels.