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the complete review - literature

Seduced by Story

by
Peter Brooks

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-observed; nicely done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Brooks wants to retain the narrativity thesis while encouraging people to be more alert and analytical about which stories are life-threatening and which are not. He clings to the concept because he can’t see an alternative source of value. (...) Brooks is the latest in a line of critics from Coleridge to I.A. Richards for whom art, given what they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation. (...) For a slim volume, Seduced by Story covers an impressive array of topics: oral narrative, the function of character, the role of narration in law, storytelling’s affinity with child’s play, what narrators know and don’t know, those raconteurs who calculate the act of narrating into their stories and those who refuse to be authoritative. In the end, however, there is a touch of desperation about demanding so much of fiction and narrative while acknowledging the ease with which they are abused." - Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Brooks’s fear is that we are so over-saturated with story that we have become undiscerning consumers, slipping too willingly into the familiar rhythms of plot, even when scepticism -- of where information is coming from and of who is delivering it -- would be more appropriate. (...) Ultimately, Brooks is less interested in proposing alternatives or in speculating about how we got here (...) than in reminding us that fiction is not reality, and life is not a story, that “telling and living are not the same thing”." - Alice Robb, New Statesman
  
  
• "Brooks sets out to show how stories work, mostly showing us how fiction works -- or doesn’t work (.....) The novels that Brooks prefers are those that teach us how to read them, that open up possibilities instead of trapping us in a shoddy contrivance with heavy-handed manipulation. (...) Seduced by Story turns out not to be the condemnation of narrative that I thought would follow from Brooks’s complaints in its early pages, but rather a potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications. Literary criticism, here to save the day !" - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
  
  
• "For Peter Brooks all receivers of stories should aspire to the playful condition of novel readers. And perhaps his book should be read in the same way -- as both partly true and a brilliant jeu d’esprit. He certainly tells a good story." - Jonathan Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       As Peter Brooks notes in the opening pages of Seduced by Story, he has long been: "arguing and teaching that narrative is in fact key to our understanding of self and surround", only to find in recent times that practically everything is being made into and comes as story, in a: "kind of narrative takeover of reality". To him: "It was as if a fledgling I had nourished had become a predator devouring reality in the name of story". Everywhere he turns, he sees: "the storification of reality" -- everything presented as a narrative, from the personal -- who we are -- to history to commercial products.
       Brooks continues to believe in the power and necessity of story, but worries about its abuse: presenting everything as (and/or reducing it to) a (usually) neat narrative for easy digestion is not always the best way of considering something, and has drawbacks as well. The case he makes, basically, is for, essentially, critical reading: understanding narrative form and function. As he points out:

     Story is powerful, and for that reason it demands a powerful critical response. We need to dismantle and contest its claims to totalistic explanatory force.

- M.A.Orthofer, 10 May 2023

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Links:

• New York Review Books publicity page
• Q & A

• The Atlantic
• BookMarks
• CBC
• Kirkus Reviews
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• Making Book
• National Book Critics Circle
• new york journal of books
• On the Seawall
• Publishers Weekly

• Faculty page

• Honoré de Balzac

• Byung-Chul Han considers Die Krise der Narration
• See Index of Literary Essays
• Other books from New York Review Books

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About the Author:

       American scholar Peter Brooks was born in 1938.

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© 2023 the complete review

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