Fiction Can Save Your Life

Flying back from New York a couple of nights ago, on the ‘red-eye’ – and never was an unaffectionate nickname more aptly bestowed – I found myself once more confronting the fact that a good book can save your life. I’m speaking figuratively, of course – although there are doubtless instances, from the bullet-stopping Bibles of numerous First World War anecdotes, to the books allegedly burned as life-saving fuel by Swansea pensioners during last winter’s cold snap, when the expression might be seen to have a more literal meaning. But I’m talking about salvation of a different kind.

Because, to judge from the numbers of people around me in the cramped, fetid spaces of Economy (and for all I know, in the luxurious haven of Business Class, too) who were fending off boredom with the aid of their Kindles and iPads, there really is nothing like fiction when the going gets tough. More traditional methods of coping with the stresses of long-haul – alcohol, melatonin tablets, watching in-flight movies – can provide only a fitful oblivion. Getting stuck into a novel offers far more than this.

Recent research at the University of Washington which suggests that our brains process stories as ‘real life’ – creating vivid mental simulations of the sights, sounds, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative, while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in our own lives, will come as no news to hardened fiction addicts. Simply, one can ‘get lost’ in a book – if getting lost is what you’re after.

Places one has never been can, by this wonderfully mimetic method, become as real to us as if one were there. Whether it’s Moscow, as seen in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, India, described by J G Farrell in The Siege of Krishnapur, or the Saigon of Greene’s The Quiet American, it’s a place we can – temporarily, at least – inhabit. Because as readers we’re time-travellers, too, able to flit from decade to decade, or indeed from century to century, at will – an aspect of the reading process not touched upon by the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory boffins.

When one has got to know a place through fiction, it always seems much more real when one actually goes there – as I found during the trip to New York which preceded that horrible late-night flight. Arriving at JFK, a week before, felt like stepping into the opening pages of Amis’s Money (it was a humid night); driving down Broadway was like a Damon Runyon short story. Here, only a few blocks away from where I was staying, was the Plaza hotel, where Jay Gatsby and his crowd had whiled away a stifling afternoon before that fateful drive back to Long Island; not far from this, was the Fifth Avenue mansion where Newland Archer first encountered the beautiful Countess Olenska, in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. A few doors down, Holly Golightly had stood gazing at the windows of Tiffany’s.

Then there was Washington Square, with its ghosts of unhappy Jamesian heroines mingling with the skateboarders and saxophone players of more recent New York stories. The crazed detectives-turned-writers of Auster’s New York Trilogy paced the streets of Greenwich Village with Michael Chabon’s 1940s comic book illustrator heroes Kavalier and Clay. If you looked one way, you might just see Alexander Portnoy disappearing into a bookshop selling dubious literature in plain brown wrappers; look in another direction, and you’d see the morbidly pretentious Victor from Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, popping into a MacDougal Street bar (now converted to a high-end restaurant) where Hemingway once used to drink.

Which brings me back to that plane trip, and the hours that needed to be filled between the inedible in-flight meal at eight, and the notional breakfast at five the following day. Fortunately, I had a long book to fill those long hours: Jonathan Franzen’s just-published Freedom. Even more fortunately, from my point of view, was that parts of it are set in New York City. So for the first time, I was able to visualise the characters’ surroundings – whether seedy Greenwich Village dive or swanky Tribeca loft apartment – from actual experience. I could accompany them along 47th Street to a jeweller’s shop very different from the one adored by Capote’s heroine, and participate in a hilariously awful family get-together in a smart SoHo restaurant not a million miles from where Puzo’s definitive saga of everyday life in an average Italian-American family began.

Best of all, I could be free – of the heat, the noise, and the claustrophobia which would otherwise have been my lot. It never fails as an escape route, fiction. One of the reasons I can’t live without it.