Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel

The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist’s moral imagination—the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities—emerge fictional persons through whom we learn to read ourselves. This eloquent book, exploring fictional lives in crucial moments of choice and change, stresses both their difference from and their deep connections with life.

Martin Price writes here about ways in ...