Lisa Zunshine on Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel

LZ says that we read novels so that we can exercise our facility at "theory of mind"—so that we can practice recognizing when other people are people, and how we can tell, and what we can do with that realization. It seems reasonable, at least about the novels that she picks to examine. A lot of them are stories about grotesque personages—Lovelace from Clarissa, Humbert from Lolita. I mean, can that really be the appeal of fiction about really boring, ordinary people? Does reading Raymond Carver really exercise my theory of mind?