Fabulous or False? 

Who hasn't heard of Tom Wolfe's contention that John Updike wrote "those fables" set in Pennsylvania? And apparently, when you are interviewed by Terry Gross you are supposed to say, "This is where my story led me." You aren't supposed to say that you had heard about this strange kiss Satan is said to have received and that's why you wrote that one scene. But come on. If you don't think that kiss was hilarious you should probably, A., have a humor transplant and B., never play tennis with the Devil. 

Why do we write? To record what has shaped us? To discover who we have been made? Or is it to shape? Is it to imagine who we could become?

I assume that by fable Tom Wolfe meant that Updike's novels were constructed as kinds of arguments. They act to prove something. They aren't an accumulation of data. I almost said mere data. Is that what a realistic novel is? Something to think about. But do you remember the Reverend Bacon in The Bonfire of the Vanities? He was one of the few actual black characters in the novel. He was some kind of cross between Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton except that he had none of the real mundane vitality of either of them -- Bacon always feels like a Dickensian cartoon version of Jackson or Sharpton, although with none of the weirdness that Dickens was a genius of. And since Bacon was such a major minor character, one couldn't help get the feeling that Bacon was meant to represent something. Even if he was not an unrealistic character (was he a recording of a real character?) it seems his role was somehow a symbol. I'm not sure of what. Probably that Wolfe could have a novel with one notorious black character and no good, strong black characters, thereby proving his authorial audacity. Of course more audacious would have been a simple non-fiction piece on Jackson or Sharpton or a more thoroughly realized fictional version of these men and perhaps some believable black children, women, janitors.

At any rate, think what you may of Wolfe, the distinction between real and false is not so clear in fiction. Fable and novel have more subtle nuances than the one has talking animals. A novel is meant to represent something, not present a whole. It's partial. That's what a symbol is, it has been abstracted, simplified. It stands for much more. It is shorthand. A novel need not have a white whale to have symbols or to represent a larger set of meanings. Novels always do that. And novels give us an experience. There is a right way to read a novel. And a bunch of wrong ways. But it is designed to shape our understanding of something. I say all of that to say that the author is not led by the story. The author originates the story. For a reason.