I love books in which a character learns, or learns to master, a new skill. I don’t necessarily buy that the character in question has to discover something deep about themself in the process of taking up Italian or marimbas, but I do believe that they’re bound to start seeing things a bit differently, to make interesting connections between elements they previously saw as belonging to different categories. And that’s when fiction can become extraordinary: when it gives you access to another mind at work, as that mind makes room for new thoughts, expands in some ways, and perhaps shrinks in others—it is pretty common to feel extremely dumb in the early stages of learning something new.
In a movie, the amassing of knowledge would more often than not be summarized in a two-minute montage: we’d see the protagonist training, or bent over books at his carrel (the passage of time indicated by changing seasons behind him), until the big match, the “your-future-relies-on-this” exam. And those movies can be great, occasionally, but novels can accommodate interiority in such spectacular ways that following its trajectory—the way its energy gets redirected on a dime, shot in the direction it now absolutely needs to go—can be the plot itself. Stories can unfold around it, but the protagonist’s mind is the plot, there is no need to rely so much on end goals, on dramatizing wins or losses, epiphanies and setbacks. The excitement lies in following a consciousness as it transforms on the way to proficiency, to fluency.
The following seven novels are, each in their own way, gorgeous examples of what I’m talking about.
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
This contemporary classic might not need introduction, but I’ll go for it anyway: narrated in turn by Sibylla and her young son Ludo (an absolute prodigy capable of reading ancient Greek and doing advanced calculus at age 5), it is perhaps the most fun novel ever written about the nature of intelligence. Sibylla is extremely smart herself, but can’t always keep up with her son, who’s constantly asking her to teach him something new. Yet her lessons are like magic tricks: when Sibylla teaches her son to read ancient Greek, we learn alongside him, and are entertained the whole way through. The book is smart and hilarious (Sibylla is very judgmental) without ever condescending to its reader. It assumes we are as smart as it is.
In its second half, Ludo goes on a quest to find a suitable father for himself, and the volume of lessons drops, but other types of learning come into play. Namely, he starts hearing a lot about games (chess, bridge), and there is this line that I find absolutely gorgeous in its simplicity when it comes to explaining what teaching is, and what its limits might be:
“When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rule to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.”
Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis
In a Toronto veterinary clinic, 15 dogs are granted (or cursed with) human intelligence overnight. The reason this happens, I’ll let the reader lucky enough not to have yet read this book find out for himself. Human intelligence doesn’t mean the dogs wake up full of opinions on the nature of time, or speaking whole sentences, but with the capacity to wonder and learn about such things. Which some of the dogs are interested in doing, and others…not so much. While a group of them establishes a common, articulated language (one dog immediately starting to pun in it, and shortly thereafter, to write poetry) others are weary of the new thoughts that naming everything has brought about. They find self-consciousness intolerable. Conflict ensues (not a spoiler alert: the pack will not stay together long). Those who embrace their new form of intelligence are in for a ride, constantly curious about the world of men. They hilariously misunderstand or near-understand it at times, but more disturbing is when they get a full grasp on what is actually going on.
The Notebook by Agota Kristof
What the unnamed twin boys narrating The Notebook are trying to master here is objectivity, although they would probably call it truth. Left in the “care” of their grandmother in a remote village in Eastern Europe during Nazi occupation, the brothers attempt to teach themselves to see the world dispassionately in order to mute and even perhaps annihilate (the reader quickly gathers) their feelings about the horror that surrounds them. In an early chapter, they explain their method to attain truth through studying and writing “compositions” about their surroundings:
“It is forbidden to write: ‘Grandmother is like a witch,’ but we are allowed to write ‘People call grandmother the Witch.’ It is forbidden to write: ‘the Little Town is beautiful,’ because the Little Town may be beautiful for us and ugly for someone else. Similarly, if we write: ‘the batman is nice,’ this isn’t a truth, because the batman may be capable of nasty acts that we know nothing about. So we would simply write: ‘the batman has given us some blankets.’ We would write: ‘We eat a lot of walnuts,’ because the word ‘love’ is not a definite word, it lacks precision and objectivity. ‘To love walnuts’ and ‘to love Mother’ don’t mean the same thing. The first expression designates a pleasant taste in the mouth, the second a feeling. Words that define feelings are very vague; it is better to avoid using them and to stick to the description of objects, human beings and oneself; that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.”
Such guidelines might sound like they will make for a stark and harrowing book, which it is (brutality mounts, the war ends, but something perhaps equally as bad replaces it, and the twins hone their survival skills by going through “Exercises to toughen the mind,” “Exercises to toughen the body,” “Exercises in Cruelty,” all dryly described), but it culminates in one of the most heart-wrenching endings I have read, the boys’ training complete.
Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine
In this short and absolutely delightful novel, there isn’t exactly a skill that the narrator tries to acquire: rather, she wants to master a whole philosophy of living. Stumbling upon Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island one day, she becomes convinced that the book holds all answers to a life well-lived. The book turns into her “golden compass” for a new life. She studies it relentlessly, and with an obsession that one might previously have thought reserved for scripture analysis. She tries to live according to its protagonist’s best qualities, which she redefines as the core values that should ground her existence: boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing. This often proves difficult, though, as she doesn’t have an income and is scared to drive, but she’s determined: she’s picked her object of study and won’t give up on it, even as her friends and family (whose concern for her is growing by the day) try to yank it away from her. She will take everyone down with her if necessary, but she won’t let go.
Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash
Another determined character is the narrator of Stephen Florida. We meet him at a time when his ultimate goal in life is to win the Kenosha Wrestling Championship (he’s a senior in college, on a wrestling scholarship). He is disciplined and so single-minded that tension rises quickly: we don’t only, as readers, start to worry that he might not win (his life shattered as a result), but also that he might (his life rendered immediately meaningless by the win, the ultimate goal already achieved at age 22). His level of commitment and obsessiveness makes it hard to imagine a positive outcome, one way or another, and yet, the description of his tactics and meticulous training is so propulsive and manic, so funny and full of heart, that we have no choice but to cheer for him. What I also love about this book is all the time we spend inside Stephen’s head while he is not training. What matters to him is time on the mat, match time. According to him, “the rest is maneuvering your mind away from the wrong things, more than keeping to the right things.” This makes it sound like Stephen’s thoughts between matches and practice might be mere blobs, floating around aimlessly as he waits, but his mind is in constant tension between those wrong and right things. He brings intensity to every little action he undertakes, including clipping toenails, and intensity is what I always look for in fiction.
Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal
I consider Maylis de Kerangal a French national treasure. Her writing is out of this world. Her sentences are immediately recognizable, inimitable in their mix of registers (colloquial, technical, lyrical)—they’re luscious and immersive. Even though she’s writing about people today, speaking normally, going about their lives, there is a sense that you’re reading mythology. I do not understand how she does it. I encountered her writing first in 2008, with her book Corniche Kennedy (which someone needs to translate into English!) and I was immediately mesmerized. As a reader, up to that point, I’d never really pictured anything while I read. The words I read would create emotional responses within me, not images. With Maylis de Kerangal, I picture everything.
Which is especially useful in Painting Time, a novel that follows Paula Karst’s journey from student at the Institut Supérieur de Peinture in Brussels (where she studies not “traditional” painting, but the at of trompe-l’oeil) to professional artist on theater and film sets. What I love about this book is how we see her reaching mastery, one trompe-l’oeil at a time, and how de Kerangal describes what mastery also creates space for: instinct. Instinct can be such a cheesy notion in fiction (novels and movies alike), but here, it rings true. The repetition of the same gestures, no matter how small, will change your body and your brain, the way they respond to the world. It’s not a plot point. Instinct, in itself, is a skill.
A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny
A young man (Bulgakov’s alter ego), freshly out of medical school in Russia, is sent to his first post in an extremely rural area, a small remote hospital. The year is 1916. He is the only doctor there, and the weight of responsibility crushes him. He worries he’s forgotten how to fix hernias and makes a plan to study them again after his work day, but his first case is a lot more challenging than a hernia: a man brings him his daughter’s mangled body (a horrible accident), the girl barely breathing. The way the first story alternates between high-tension moments in the operating theatre and calmer scenes in which the protagonist retreats to his room to study the case at hand feels extremely true to life: the solution will be found in textbooks, the protagonist thinks. He needs to amass more knowledge, because the instincts are not yet there. By the end of the book, this will have changed.
Magnetic Fields by Ron Loewinsohn
In the first 50 pages of the book, we meet Albert, an apprentice burglar, and Jerome, his mentor. We follow Albert as he goes from house to house, learns to always identify at least two escape routes, what to look for and where, and teaches himself to stop being startled by his reflection in mirrors (always oddly placed, it turns out, when encountered in other people’s homes). Albert is a simple man. What he likes about being a burglar is the hours.
“They allowed him to do the things he really wanted to do—hang out with his friends, play pinball and basketball, get laid, go to movies in the afternoon, which he loved to do: to come out of the cool darkness of the movie, still excited with the other life he had been part of, and then to walk out into the hot, bright light of the day. He felt then that the day was something he had chosen, as he had chosen the movie.”
Still excited with the other life he had been part of—this feeling he experiences exiting a movie theatre he also encounters at work. At first, Albert spends a lot of time in the houses he burglarizes, imagining what the people who live there might do with the strange objects he notices, what they ever saw in them (a goose shaped lamp, a ceramic match-strike). But as his training progresses, he will have to sacrifice this pleasure on the altar of efficiency (and personal safety), and that feels like a tremendous loss, for both him and the reader, who’s gotten immersed and guiltily comfortable seeing the world through his eyes.
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