THE EXAMINED LIFE
Morality Tales

By Joshua Glenn, 4/27/2003

EVERY 10 YEARS since 1983, the London-based literary quarterly Granta has devoted an issue to new fiction by the ''Best of Young British Novelists.'' On May 1, Granta editor Ian Jack will host a reading by contributors to the latest installment at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. Those on hand will be Andrew O'Hagan, Alan Warner, and Zadie Smith, the author most recently of ''The Autograph Man'' and a 2002-03 Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard. Ideas caught up with Smith via telephone at her Cambridge apartment.

IDEAS: At Radcliffe, you're now researching and writing a nonfiction book titled ''The Morality of the Novel.''

SMITH: Well, let's just say that I'm re-reading a few of my favorite 20th-century novelists-including E.M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, Zora Neale Hurston, Kingsley Amis, J.D. Salinger, and David Foster Wallace-with the notion that their fiction reveals something of their own ethical ideals. Except for the British critic James Wood, contemporary literary critics tend to avoid this question.

IDEAS: There's a prevailing assumption that novelists like David Foster Wallace or yourself, who write in a nervously intellectual, extremely self-conscious style, must be amoralists-or at least relativists. Morality, according to this view, is most likely to inhere in a straightforward narrative style.

SMITH: If by ''morality'' you mean normative ethics, it seems to me that moralistic novels aren't really literature at all-because whereas moral philosophy aspires to a transcendent ''view from nowhere,'' every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy-it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

IDEAS: In his review of ''The Autograph Man'' a few months ago, James Wood wrote that ''Smith is interested in contemporary self-consciousness. Insofar as she is a moralist, she is a moralist about this.'' Exactly how is today's self-consciousness a moral problem?

SMITH: I do feel that acute self-consciousness has been an ethical problem for my generation, but that's only because I'm attracted to the neo-Platonic idea-one championed by the novelist Iris Murdoch-that we can't access the Good that exists out there in the world unless we first escape from the cocoon of ourselves, through an empathetic act of love, sex, or reading, for example. Novelists like the ones I'm studying right now train us to be empathetic, it seems to me, by requiring readers to experience what it's like to be someone else. So extreme self-consciousness, which often stops me and others my age from exiting our own heads, can actually prevent us from behaving ethically.

This story ran on page E3 of the Boston Globe on 4/27/2003.