A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.
Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.
Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.
I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.
A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.
The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.