The Good Life and Other Fictions

How novels attune us to the broader role of fiction in our lives—our everyday yet remarkable ability to think and live “as if”

Why do we weep at fictitious things? How do we act on the basis of them? How much of moral life revolves around make-believe? In The Good Life and Other Fictions, David Dwan shows how literary fictions confront us with the wider role of fictiveness in our lives—the storied character we give to experience, our reliance on ideation, idealization and metaphor, the ways we depend on ideas that we know to be untrue or are only true because we choose to believe in them. In an age of fake news and fake antifakery, Dwan argues that we need a more differentiated sense of the fictive. Fiction is not necessarily fraud, nor is it simply error and unreality. Indeed, it is often the source of what’s best about us—the space in which the good life is imagined and talked into being.

Drawing on over a century of literary fiction—and offering detailed studies of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis and Iris Murdoch—Dwan investigates different facets of fictional experience, from imaginative projection to wishful thinking to self-deception to lies. Novels, he contends, both express and expose the ways we see through illusion, spending much of our time in a twilight state between reality and unreality, credulity and doubt, assent and dissent. Interrogating the benefits and limits of a fictive attitude—our deep yet dangerous need to operate “as if”—Dwan makes a highly original contribution to the field of ethical criticism, and to our general understanding of how life is made livable through fiction.