I’m not sure how this book ended up in my reading pile, but it may have been the subtitle: “A guide for people who love books and for those to want to write them.” What kept me reading was the first chapter, “Close Reading,” where I was delighted to discover that Prose and I did our stint in academia around the same time. How strange and wonderful to find a book published in 2006 that unabashedly favors “reading what [is] on the page with only passing reference to the biography of the writer or the period in which the text was written.”

Just to be clear, she’s not trying to make a case for the return of the New Criticism, or deny the validity of social or political context. What she is trying to do is answer the question that begins this book: “Can creative writing be taught?” And “close reading” is what she offers as an answer.

So I really wanted to like this book. But the author made it very difficult.

To begin with, I can see why she chose the structure she did (a chapter each on words, sentences, paragraphs, narration, character, dialog, details, gesture, and — Chekhov?), but the last third felt repetitive and lost focus for me, perhaps because of the longer passages needed to make her point.

And about those extended examples. Oh what a tasty book it would have been if she used more writers from–the last hundred years, maybe? As much as I admire Jane Austen or love Flaubert or appreciate the importance of Middlemarch, I felt by the time I got to the end of the book that it was just too much; too much to ask. Prose even has a convincing argument to justify her choice of examples–her success in getting undergraduates who weren’t lit majors deeply involved in responding to works like Heinrich von Kleist’s novella The Marquise of O—. (Maybe I was too interested in the early 20th century Brits when I was in school, but I definitely missed that one.)

Still, I tried to play along, and even was able to imagine myself reading all thirteen volumes of Chekhov’s stories, as she advises in Chapter 10. And I definitely can’t deny that the final chapter, “Reading for Courage,” spoke to me. But overall, the book left me thinking more about the missed opportunities than anything else.

A disappointment, I thought. But not for long. Because with the very next piece of fiction I picked up (“Silk Brocade,” a short story by Tessa Hadley), I discovered that I was indeed reading more closely; that I actually did have more ways to appreciate good writing; and that despite her antique examples, Francine Prose had taught me that there actually was more that I could learn from my favorite books.

I may have more to say about “Silk Brocade” later.