Would Jane Austen like Ender's Game?

Thoughts on what makes a good novel

Last weekend, instead of writing, I was cleaning up toddler puke (and doing some puking myself). Also, my husband was out of town, so it was just me and the sickies. We watched a lot of movies. And at night, when the kids were finally sleeping, I finished Northanger Abbey.

I was pleasantly surprised. My mom (hi mom!) has been telling me my whole life that Northanger Abbey isn’t very good, and I gotta say I disagree. The heroine, Catherine Morland, is the best. She is sweet and innocent and good. Her problem is naivité, lack of discernment, and it gets her in trouble on multiple occasions; but never is she mean or calculating or morally wrong. I was delighted with her.

Northanger Abbey is also about The Novel, and I found it fascinating to watch Jane Austen, normally so subtle, basically pick a fight with her contemporary Ann Radcliffe. Early in Northanger Abbey, Austen explicitly addresses the role of the novel in her book:

Yes, novels; — for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust…Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

Now, this is certainly partially ironic; though Catherine does read novels—in particular Ms. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho—the novel in question certainly endures the gauntlet of Austen’s peerless wit and comes out the other end in tatters. And yet you can hear a note of something true, maybe softer than bitterness, but certainly as strong as criticism; novels are Jane Austen’s work and they are looked down on by her society. Never mind that they are “only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” This is Austen’s defense of the novel.

I wonder, then, if she considers Ms. Radcliffe’s work worthy of the title. It is clear Austen finds Udolpho neither witty nor knowledgable of human nature. Perhaps she rankles at being lumped together with such a writer. Or perhaps she simply finds the comparison funny.

It certainly makes for a funny story. Famously, under the influence of Udolpho, Catherine becomes convinced that her friends’s father has murdered his wife, or else is keeping her captive in his home. She sneaks around the Abbey where they live searching for the missing mother, sure that she is about to uncover some such horror—an emaciated woman, perhaps, or a still-bloody knife. Here is the rebuttal from Henry Tilney, the book’s male lead, when her suspicions are found out:

“Remember the country and age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you — Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”

They had reached the end of the gallery; and with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.

Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Morland, says Henry Tilney. Don’t be ridiculous, Ms. Radcliffe, says Jane Austen. Gothic novels aren’t real.

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Back to the puke-y weekend. We puked, we did laundry, we ate plain noodles, we read Northanger Abbey. Then my husband got home, and in addition to cleaning the house and making us dinner (bless him), he fulfilled his end of the business-trip bargain by handing me a new book. This time it was Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card.

I blew through it.

For some reason I had Ender’s Game lumped in with The Hunger Games and other slightly trashy teen sci-fi dystopian fiction. But you know what? It was really good.

In case anyone else missed it, Ender’s Game tells the story of a young boy, Ender, who is hand-picked by the government to be trained as a commander in the impending space war. He’s a genius, but they want him for more than that; the theory is that his personality is the right one to wield that genius with the best results. So he leaves his family and becomes a weapon.

The characters are effective, the social dynamics are excruciating, the sci-fi is cool, the moral discussion is not lame. And yet on a sliding scale from Northanger Abbey to Udolpho, it’s probably more towards Udolpho.

That’s not to say genre fiction can’t skew more towards Jane Austen on this scale. Within sci-fi, Brave New World, The Lathe of Heaven, and Fahrenheit 451 come to mind. But Ender’s Game is for-fun sci-fi, not for-school sci-fi. And I wonder what Jane Austen would think. What makes Ender’s Game better than YA trash? Even better: What makes a good novel?

Maybe those are two different questions. Ender’s Game isn’t garbage because the plot is intricate, the prose doesn’t get in the way, the world-building is believable. And in fact, I think it checks one of Austen’s categories: a “knowledge of human nature.” The world Orson Scott Card has built rings true.

As to what makes a good novel—what do we think? Do we accept Austen’s list?

…only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

Are we comfortable grading all genres against the same criteria, or are we tempted to divide “serious” novels (like Austen’s) from genre fiction (like Ender’s Game, or Udolpho)?

Naomi Kanakia

has a great piece called “The Short Story is Dead, Just Make Sure the Casket is Nailed Good and Shut” that talks about the division of fiction between “serious” and “unserious”, and how the unserious fiction is what is actually being read (at least in the world of contemporary short stories). And

Henry Oliver

has a piece called “How to Have Good Taste” in which he says “The better we know a piece of art, the more we can see it for it is, and not have our judgement clouded by our pre-existing feelings. The more we have read, the better we know where a new book fits. The more ignorant we are, the more likely it is that we will be dazzled by mediocrity.”

I think this is the goal—to see clearly what it is we are reading. If it’s pulpy sci-fi, great; maybe if I’ve read enough of the classics I’ll be able to tell what pulp is worth it and what isn’t. This would have helped Catherine Morland, certainly; if she had has the discernment to see where Udolpho was situated along the sliding scale of literature, she wouldn’t have tried to apply it to her life. If she had seen Udolpho for what it was, it would not have gotten the better of her. And I still think she could have enjoyed reading it.

It all comes back to being a good reader. Catherine Morland was a poor reader of Udolpho, and therefore a poor reader of her own life. Henry Tilney, on the other hand, was a good reader of Udolpho; he enjoyed it and laughed at it and never let it shape his vision of reality.

Sometimes a book is worth applying, worth examining and internalizing, worth letting it shape your understanding of your own life. There are several books that have done that for me—Middlemarch, Brideshead Revisited, The Little Prince. And there are lots of books that have entertained me that I draw no such existential conclusions from—Ender’s Game among them.

I do think it’s a gradient, or a sliding scale, and that the general shape of it is objectively true. Shakespeare is serious and good, Shadow and Bone is not. Ya know? But one of the best readers I know doesn’t like Middlemarch. And my neighbor hated Ender’s Game. There is room for personality, in reading. You get to move things around on your personal book list. You get to set your own rankings. Your list will just get better the more you read, and the more you understand what you read.

I wonder what Jane Austen’s list looked like.

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