“literature not only breaks the rules, but makes us realize that there are none.“
pg 250

Francine Prose’s book is a book about books. It is about learning to read and write from writers who write lasting works: Eliot, Austen, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Bronte, etc. Half her book is filled with quotes from other books demonstrating the craft of writing. (If you can’t tell, Prose’s book excites a book lover and a wannabe writer.)

My degree is in literary studies, all we did was examine paragraphs, sentences, words, details, and theory in literature, and I loved every examination. Prose’s book is a four-year degree condensed into 268 pages of text. She explores words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialogue, details, and gestures embedded in lasting texts written by master writers. Prose systematically relays to the reader why certain texts last, how they reflect human nature, and how they cling to our memories. I took notes and highlighted and re-read and learned, and then at the very end, Prose undermines her work.

“Reading can give you the courage to resist all of the pressures that our culture exerts on you to write in a certain way, or to follow a prescribed form” (258). Basically, Prose argues that the craft of writing is boundless in its creation. The nature of writing is to break the rules. We can look back over the texts of courageous writers and prescribe what and how it’s valuable, but what Prose ends her book with, is that literature is valuable because when it is written, the author writes it how they want. “Art implies a kind of freedom, the freedom of choice, of possibility, of the individual imagination” (264).

Thank you, Francine Prose (sweet name, by the way, for a writer.) I love the premise of learning to write from reading. I love the examination of texts. I love the passion for life and humans that seeps from your words. And I love that, in the end, you present a paradox. You release your reader, free them, to write; to know the rules, and to break them.