LIVING BY FICTION

An equable, frequently elegant, and unpious essay on the vagaries and harmonies of fiction. Although Dillard seems at first (and at the last) to chide modernist fiction for being "device laid bare," she's sophisticated enough to recognize its abiding, even traditional strengths—the plenitude, the overlapping of contexts, the constructive glee: "it dissects the living, articulated joints where temporal events merge and arranges the bright bones on the ground." As the scientifically and epistemologically oriented author of naturalist meditations (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm), Dillard does not discard potential tools of knowledge; she sticks with modernist fiction beyond skepticism and relativism until it too offers up the "bits of world" from which all fiction—most human of arts—is made. She isn't dazzled by language per se: "Language is itself like a work of art: it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders. How then could we say that language encloses and signifies phenomena, when language is a fabricated grid someone stuck in a river?" But she does stand in awe of prose as a cognitive apparatus—"as though a wielded wrench, like a waved soap bubble wand, were to emit a trail of fitted bolts in its wake." For that reason, she's especially fine here on the honor of "plain" prose (Henry Green, Eudora Welty, Wright Morris); its "stubborn uniqueness." Equally lucent is Dillard's chapter on hidden meaning, on the novel of ideas; it serves as a good, if less rigorous, complement to Mary McCarthy's recent laments. But Dillard's central argument is a plea for fiction, with its valuable sloppiness and unshakable traditionalness, to expand into a thoroughgoing, unpinched, and unapologetic branch of knowledge: "We are missing a whole new class of investigators: those who interpret the raw universe in terms of meaning." Dillard's tone may be a little too general, a little too loose (she seems to be measuring her good-natured essayistic lope at all times), but that integrative wish is fundamentally sane and attractive. An enjoyable and thoughtful, often superbly phrased little book.