This is, ultimately, a book about the world. It inquires about the world’s meaning. It attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. The teacup at hand, in this case, is contemporary fiction.

Why read fiction to think about the world? You may, like most of us most of the time, read fiction for other things. You may read fiction to enjoy the multiplicity and dazzle of the vivid objects it presents to the imagination; to hear its verbal splendor and admire its nimble narrative; to enter lives not your own; to feel, on one hand, the solemn stasis and immutability of the work as enclosed art object—beginning and ending the same way every time you read it, as though a novel were a diagram inscribed forever under the vault of heaven—and to feel, on the other hand, the plunging force of time compressed in its passage, and that compressed passage like a river’s pitch crowded with scenes and scenery and actions and characters enlarged and rushing headlong down together. You may, I say, enjoy fiction for these sensations, and turn to nonfiction for thought.