![]() ![]() This is wildly ahistorical, but for me and millions of other readers it both passes the Superman test and is a big part of what makes the books so enjoyable, and the main character so easy to like (as the real-life Cromwell, apparatchik and bureaucrat and religious ideologue, definitely wasn’t). ![]() In Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novels about Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist’s consciousness, perceptions, and psychology are entirely those of a modern man. The test doesn’t apply only to genre fiction, and it’s also the case that the point of maximum unlikeliness can be one of the best things about a fictional world. Mine is something that I call the Superman test: Is what I’m being asked to believe less likely than the character’s being able to fly? The question is not “Is it good?” but “Is this for me?” Most readers have their own standards for how much implausibility they can handle. This isn’t the same thing as aesthetic judgment-deciding whether a book is good as a work of art. If something makes our disbelief become unsuspended-one implausibility too many, a series of narratorial bum notes-then the whole fiction comes crashing down. Rather, as readers, we usually fight the story a little bit at the beginning, while we’re getting our ear in then we submit, and are carried along by the flow, unless something happens to jolt us out of it. ![]() The suspension is voluntary, though not necessarily conscious it’s not as if you reach up and toggle a setting in your brain. Kikuo JohnsonĪll fiction depends on what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief,” the reader’s decision to put the argumentative, quibbling part of his mind into neutral and go along for the narrative ride. The Jack Reacher novels deftly ground wish fulfillment in earthbound detail. ![]()
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