I am not thinking only of dusty classics. I happened just now to read an early Edna O'Brien novel, Girl with Green Eyes. The protagonist is a young woman, a self-educated and sexually naive working girl, who is eager for a liaison with a wealthy, cosmopolitan, older married man. The affair does end, and the young woman suffers. But she has the resilience to make the experience the basis for her entry into adult intellectual life.
Social experiences are like that.
They are not lived by just anyone, but by individuals with particular strengths. The function of the novel, in additon to amusement, is to remind us of ambiguity, ambivalence, variety of viewpoint. Facing the notion that I might write a self-help book, I decided that my way of making it correspond to a serious understanding of relationships would be to draw on techniques of contemporary fiction, in the belief that the fiction of our time represents the reality of our time as well as it can be represented in written narrative. Images of others are creative acts. Relationships are creative acts.