If you take up Jane Smiley’s novels, the first thing you might notice is their granularity. While some novelists find freedom in bending genre, Smiley revels in a different, adjacent understanding—that in order to flourish, novels require parameters, perhaps even those imposed by genre expectations, and that these expectations also shape her understanding of the world. In 2005’s 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Smiley recalls that when she was working on a mystery, all novels seemed to function as whodunits, whereas in the act of writing historical fiction, she came to believe that all novels bore an element of the historical.
Her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres, inspired by the family dynamics of King Lear by way of an Iowa farm, is rightly—I feel—her best-known work. But Smiley is the author of many other celebrated, memorable, and lively books (more than 30 of them) as well. In each of her novels, she takes an empirical, grounded approach to narrative and setting.
Smiley’s latest effort, The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom, is a slim but rangy volume featuring 18 accessible B sides that twine details of place and musings on novels—both writing and reading them. These essays offer a set of sprints through California literature, motherhood, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, My Ántonia, Little Women, and Alice Munro, among other subjects. It takes a moment to understand that place is an important connective tissue here.
What Smiley explores with particular insight is the relationship between motherhood and traditional novels—which is to say novels that involve adjustments to character, scene, and story. As she observes, the novel is a malleable form that allows for insights about how people and places change, a perspective not unlike that afforded by raising children.
When Lauren Sandler wrote in the Atlantic that the secret of being able to write as a mother was to have only one kid, Smiley was one of several novelists who took exception. “The key,” she wrote, “is not having one child, it is living in a place where there is excellent daycare and a social world that allows fathers to have the time and the motivation to fully share in raising kids.”
The Questions That Matter Most reads like a further rejoinder.
In the provocatively titled “Can Mothers Think?,” Smiley reflects on how unusual it has been to locate mothers who speak in a literary voice. Few narrative models exist for successful motherhood, impoverishing both potential mothers and society at large. At the same time, she detects, the majority of what she calls the most “interesting writers of our time” are women who have children. “Mothers are busily, energetically, and prolifically exploring undiscovered territory within our own psyches,” she writes, “and therefore within the psyches of our readers.… They have revealed worlds that are new and old at the same time, worlds that we have never read about before but that we know are true.”
Smiley offers close readings of specific works to investigate their tone. She got a chuckle out of me, a fellow ardent re-reader of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for fêting spoiled-artist Amy, whom I’ve loved to hate for four decades now. The surprising position of the essay “I Am Your ‘Prudent Amy’” is that she is the character Smiley most enjoys. Amy, she recognizes, is the one who worked with what she had, in terms of both talent and circumstances—unlike Jo or Meg. As the youngest of four, Amy would have been left, early and often, to experience things without maternal intervention, and that experience would have shaped her subsequent response to repeated hardships and rivalries.
On a first read of this essay, I wasn’t persuaded that Amy was anything other than a horrific manuscript-burner. I will keep my disdain and my preference for the writer-agitators, I thought, thank you very much. But remembering what Smiley had written about the possibilities for a mother-centric literature, I read the Little Women essay again. This time around, I inhabited Smiley’s perspective as a novelist-mother and came to wonder, against my own instincts, whether maybe she was right—that, in repeatedly encountering hurdles that taught her how to get along in a potentially hostile culture, Amy was, of all the characters, perhaps the most pragmatic feminist.
Such hard-won practicality undergirds other essays in the collection. Smiley extols the novelist Anthony Trollope, and in “Writing Is an Exercise in Freedom,” which concludes the volume, she examines Trollope’s contemporary Charles Dickens, in particular his novel Our Mutual Friend. Within the abundance of sentences there, she explains, there is sometimes one that seizes her. “To me, that’s the essence of the novel,” she tells us: “the tension between wanting to linger in appreciation of an individual line and wanting to see what happens next.”
The Questions That Matter Most’s most unique insights may have to do with motherhood, but the throughline is broader. Motherhood and family, as Smiley envisions them, are as much a place as, say, California is. Years ago, she wrote that “to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.”
As the essays here remind us, that’s too humble by half.•
Heyday THE QUESTIONS THAT MATTER MOST: READING, WRITING, AND THE EXERCISE OF FREEDOM, BY JANE SMILEY
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
