The Rooms of Fiction

Novels inhabit rooms the way people do, which is to say absentmindedly or incompletely. Often, the novel’s figures hardly notice the spaces they’ve been furnished. How could it be any different for the reader? The bright packet of detail offered in passing is inadequate to the demands of vivid perception. Being habituated readers, we populate these vacancies, though this is akin to whistling in the dark. (A reader abhors a void.) When reading novels, I find rooms to be insubstantial things, like mists or mirages. They are provisional, forever subject to a process of mental revision. The inconsistencies that arise from a reader’s apprehension grant the novel a certain perceptual drift. A shifting, cubist structure arises from the indeterminacy. That the rooms of fiction don’t tend to disorient us nearly as much as the depictions of consciousness they contain speaks not to any inherent stability they might possess, but rather to the reader’s acclimation to a lived environment. We are too comfortable within these rooms, which deserve our scrutiny, even our suspicion. What I mean to say is that accepted space is a habit fiction can break, if we allow it to.