The Angel's Game review by Josh

This book reminded me why I read fiction - and why I read so much less of it than I used to.

Start with the positives: Zafón is a masterful storyteller. He grabs you from the first page and doesn't let go until his tale has wound its way to a conclusion that is both formulaic and unpredictable. I'm trying my hand at writing a novel, and I would put Zafón in the same rarified league as Stephen King, Dan Brown, and J.K. Rowling when it comes to the ability to put characters through their paces in precisely the way that makes you want to read just one more page before going to sleep.

Popular fiction has long gotten a bad rap from the critical establishment. Of course, the line between literary and popular fiction has always been blurry, not to mention laden with cultural baggage. But that doesn't make the distinction meaningless.

For a long time, one of the distinctions between high and low art was essentially that high art required a great deal of education to understand. Shakespeare became a central part of the literary canon partly because generations of readers and scholars had decided that his work was worth the effort required to understand it. Later writers like Joyce took this principle to its logical extreme, producing books that were difficult almost by design.

From this angle, the priesthood of literature can look a bit like a sham: a great circle jerk subsidized by a crowd of awed followers hoping that they might one day be invited to join.

David Foster Wallace, who had been invited into the circle early in his career, had a more interesting objection. His point, as I understand it, was that literary fiction makes you work, and if you're going to ask readers to work, there ought to be some payoff. Critical approval is one kind of payoff, but it's not necessarily a very meaningful one, and dedicating your life to producing difficult books doesn't automatically make you a paragon of sophistication or wisdom.

Wallace thought difficult literature needed to offer something more substantial. At its best, fiction lets you experience what it's like to be inside the head of another human being - ideally one with some interesting thoughts.

Popular fiction tends to approach human problems by making them externally legible. Someone is trying to kill you, so you run away. Someone has kidnapped your daughter, so you find her. Someone has stolen the treasure, so you get it back. The threat and the desired outcome are visible, and the basic question is what you need to do to get from one to the other.

Literary fiction is often interested in problems for which there is no obvious action to take. Safety, connection with other people, freedom, curiosity, love, status, and a sense of meaning are still the underlying things that human beings care about, but obtaining them in ordinary life is much less straightforward. What do you do when you're not scared of a man with a gun, but of climate change? Or the possibility of political authoritarianism arising from a complicated combination of social and political forces? Or your own self-doubt? There may be things you can do, but there is no obvious sequence of actions that will make the problem go away. Understanding what you should want, what you should fear, and what you should do about it requires a different kind of imaginative work.

That's one reason literary fiction can give you access to the mind of another person in a way that action-driven fiction sometimes can't. If a man with a gun is chasing you, there isn't much mystery about what most people would do. But if you're lonely, dissatisfied with your marriage, afraid that you've wasted your life, or unsure whether your ambitions are actually worth pursuing, there isn't a single obvious human response. Fiction can make us inhabit those ambiguities rather than simply watch someone overcome them.

Having said virtually nothing about the plot of the book, I feel a little guilty about throwing in a #spoiler, but The Angel's Game eventually calls into question the reliability of its narrator—a move that seems designed to push the novel toward potentially literary territory.

If the man with the gun on the street turns out to have been, at least partly, a man with a gun in the protagonist's mind, things get more complicated. But Zafón doesn't really examine the complication. It's a gesture toward the idea that Wallace, in his review of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, calls the "empty plenum": a mind that is full of ideas, but disconnected from other minds.

Markson spends an entire novel exploring this idea - which I remember finding quite dull, though the topic itself is potentially interesting. Zafón, by contrast, tosses it out almost as an aside and doesn't have very much to say about it. It feels a bit like pouring Boone's Farm into a fancy glass and calling yourself a sommelier. It doesn't convince anybody. I know, I've tried.

And I think that's the genuinely interesting challenge for fiction writ