Bourdieu, Sinykin, and many of those he quotes view reading and writing primarily as social activities, inextricable from our relations with others. Anyone who has read a novel knows this is true and it would be pointless to deny it. One of the reasons we read literature is to experience the author’s purchase on society and to see how it corresponds with our own. Literature’s perennial advantage over sociology is that it can do this through the means of irony, paradox, and beauty. It is not restricted to the empirical, it is free to invent, it has recourse to fantasies that are truer than real life. It is less enamored with disclosing the obvious. The greater the novelist, the richer the picture of the world depicted within it, but also the more resistant the work becomes to being reduced to sociology. There is a reason why, when Thomas Piketty wants to add flourishes to his map of the economy in nineteenth-century France, he turns to Balzac, and why Lionel Trilling thought there was no better guide to property in Regency England than Jane Austen. But for the novelists themselves this sociological richness is a byproduct of their aesthetic ambition, never the main chance.