Every few years a variation on this theme can be found in a new study: reading great literature increases empathy; it stimulates sympathies that would otherwise remain dormant, and the novel’s lost significance (and the reading public’s shrinking size) is alarming because we are in dire need of empathy in a polarized age. I want to stake a different claim: that literature, like other arts, helps us only to the extent that it first helps us to see. Any moral or emotional effect of literature (and a fully moral response is both rational and emotional) is secondary to, and consequent upon, literature’s great gift: before they bring us into ethical deliberations, novels and short stories coax us into the realm of natural contemplation.

As Dostoyevsky learned firsthand, a firing squad can make you think about what really matters. Can a novel?