“No one ever stops to wonder whether novels think, yet they observe us and draw conclusions,” Martín Solares laments in How to Draw a Novel. “We have to accept from the start that they have not one form, but many; that they have many ways of telling their stories, and realism is only one of these.”
The lack Solares describes corrodes contemporary American fiction and writing handbooks, manuals, textbooks, and guides. Expected texts, soulless texts, limited by realism, crafted like wrenches and screws — not the observant eyes of childhood dolls and the cuckoos springing out of grandfather clocks. What a relief, then, to discover in the how-to, that most terrifying and wasted of genres, a belief in the many and a belief in the agency of art.
How to Draw a Novel, originally written in Spanish and published in 2014, brings whimsy and ingenuity to a genre lacking in both. How-to guides were doomed from the beginning: we can truly know something only by living it. Books about writing reveal more about the guide-writer than about the art of writing; at best they can excite a novice writer to rush to a keyboard or nudge experienced writers to look on their own work from a slightly different stance. The ultimate failure of writing guides might result from their obsession with teachable craftification, in the posture of the guide-maker, in the difference between you and we. Literature is a shared experience across words, pages, people, and times: where, in writing treatises, can we find a few words on that?
Solares’s book succeeds because he avoids saying how to. Instead of pointing at the reader, he walks beside the reader, like a local leading one through the Swiss Alps, pointing out hidden lakes and the posture of an overlooked chamois, there, blending into the ridge. The author positions the book as “a collection of drawings and notes about novels, those strange beings that live among us.” His notes ponder the expected topics of character, structure, and plot, but also other important aspects that guides seldom describe. Solares classifies titles and considers the quality of the novelesque; he counts the numbers of years it took authors to finish constructing great novels (five for Bovary, fifteen for Ulysses); he compares theories of time in fiction, accounting for Bakhtin, Eco, Barthes, and Genette in the space of one paragraph. Solares delivers an illuminating essay on Pedro Páramo as well as a redemptive reading of the chapters on whaling in Moby-Dick. It “looks like a novel,” he writes, “but it is actually a radical lesson in the beauty and necessity of digressions.”
Rather than dwelling on individual works, Solares primarily draws insight from a range of global, mostly male authors: Jean Echenoz, J.D. Salinger, Zambra, Marías, Flaubert, César Aria, Salvador Elizondo, Paul Aster, Carson McCullers, and many others. When Solares samples from these authors to think about the evolution of the novel and its genres, his writing comes to life. “The greatest stylists of crime fiction craft their novels like urgent, rushed confessions,” writes Solares, a crime writer himself. Elsewhere he describes how “nineteenth-century novelists circled like birds around their subjects” while contemporary novelists begin with “the impression … that the reader is boarding a moving train.” In another passage, he explains: “Contradictory as it might seem, there are specific places in the haunted house of fiction where the ghosts should appear.” Heather Cleary manages to convey the lively wonder of Solares’s prose in her English translation — a triumph for any translator — though the U.S. publisher, Grove Press, omits her name from the cover.
In this how-to that is different from how-tos, we also find the other promise of the title. How to Draw a Novel is not a book of drawings but rather a book inspired by drawing. Amongst chapters, Solares sketches the shapes of novels as well as a timeline of the novel, from The Iliad to Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. In one chapter, Solares draws the evolution of the novel as a car, beginning with the vintage and arriving at the tiny two-doors parked on the curbs of the narrow streets of Rome. In another, he depicts thrillers as a pair of scissors and the peeled layers of an onion. And all throughout, Solares experiments with visualizing the drama of classic novels in peaks, swirls, arrows, and curves.
These drawings come from the experience of reading because, Solares writes, “when we finish reading a novel, we sense that every phrase has contributed to creating a form that reveals itself fully only in that final moment. Sometimes we are so aware of this form that we feel an impulse to draw.” Here, of course, the we means me, and I wonder whether the drawings will be legible to readers. The drawings decorating Solares’s writing encourage the reader to visualize the novel’s structure, and after initially baffling me, I skimmed past them. But later in the book they presented themselves as something different: not the definitive translation of a novel into a visual shape, but entries in a personal library, written in a private language. Solares provides “a method for measuring novelesque excitement,” with prompts to “mark the events that most grabbed you” and “draw a graphic representing these moments,” “identifying and examining the different kinds of questions a writer inspired in you.” Drawings not as analysis, not as reverse blueprint, not as lessons in form, but as personal records of exhilaration.
Solares uses the how-to as an occasion for thinking about form and beauty — and, most movingly, for reflections not on the novel but on what the novel does to us. Solares points out that “the good novelist multiplies the reader without their even noticing,” a marvelous and accurate image, because is it not true that, once an author moves us with her prose, once we pass through the world of a novel, we emerge as more than what we were when we began, as multiples of ourselves? Even momentarily, novels change us, as “the novel, among other things, is a preparation for life that death peeks through; it shows us to look with reverence at the mundane.” Soon inspiration and lucidity dissolve; Solares writes in a later passage, “another night comes when we return home, disappointed and exhausted, and realize how much we need a mythology, how much we need novels that talk about those who were trapped here before us, and their lucky or naïve attempts to find their way out.”
How to Draw a Novel inspires through its attention to our inner lives, and the inner lives of books. In one passage, Solares plays with the conceit of taking an X-ray of novels, which would allow us to “see that they are not disinterested parties: the X-ray would reveal the lines of emotion that drive them.” He cites Umberto Eco, who wrote that “un romanzo è una macchina per generare interpretazioni,” meaning, “the novel is a machine for generating interpretations.” But Solares writes that “as Umberto Eco once said, the novel is a machine for generating agony.” Regardless of whether Solares misremembered, or whether a translator of Eco mistranslated, we gain something — everything — in the step from interpretation to agony. Because, Solares shows, a novel is more than interpretation, more than lesson, more than theory. It is machine of feeling — controlled, produced, and liberated feeling.
So, finally, Solares poses the questions that inspire this book about the novel — perhaps every book about the novel and every novel ever written — the questions that arise within us as we close the back cover of a book we cherish: “That voice we’ve had with us for so long … Will we ever hear it again? How did we get so attached to a being made only of words?”
[Published by Grove Press on December 12, 2023, 224 pages, $20.00 US hardcover]