This fairly short, but ambitious, book is basically an exploration of fiction, what it is, and how we relate to it.

I confess, I found myself slightly frustrated with the first couple of chapters, in which Oatley discusses the idea of fiction as a sort of simulation that we can accept into our minds and how it engages the "theory of mind" that we develop as children, as he seemed to be circling around some ideas that seemed very obvious to me based on my own personal experience of fiction, but in a way that never seemed nearly as clear and direct as it ought to be.

Fortunately, he settles into the topic much better after that, and I found the next chapter, about the interaction between readers and stories -- the collaboration between what we bring to a text and what's there on the page -- to be, if not exactly revelatory, engaging and rather well-expressed. He then goes on to talk about such interesting things as the difference between the events of a story and the plot, the ways in which images in a film can be juxtaposed to evoke emotion, differences between inexperienced and expert writers in the process of creating a story, and psychological studies on whether reading fiction makes you more empathetic. I think there are some really good insights in here, and some slightly mushy speculations, but overall it was thought-provoking and definitely worth reading

It did, however, feel to me somewhat limited in its subject matter. Unsurprisingly, although he claims his subject is fiction in general, Oatley is mostly focused on literary fiction, with some brief dips into filmmaking and some incidental discussion of things like detective stories. He doesn't snobbishly dismiss genre fiction out of hand the way too many literary types do, despite making a point of drawing a distinction (reasonable, I think, if very fuzzy and subjective) between books that qualify as art and ones that simply aim to be entertaining. But he's not really talking about fiction in nearly as broad and sweeping a way as he seems to think he is. (Heck, he completely leaves out television and comics/graphic novels in his list of things that qualify as "fiction," which I'd say reveals a significant blind spot.) But then, there are probably quite a few ways in which he's barely scratching the surface of what there is to say about fiction, and a book that tried to say everything about every form of fiction would be unreadably long. ( )

According to the author, the book is intended for “general readers, psychologists, literary theorists, and students,” of which I can only admit to being the first of the list, and perhaps also the last, albeit informally at this point. The book is roughly 200 fairly dense but not difficult pages in eight chapters, clearly a scholarly pursuit by the author, but also, I suspect, a labor of love—a love of fiction, that is.

[Such Stuff as Dreams] explores the psychology of fiction, how it works on our brains. Oatley discusses fiction in relationship to:
*Dream: modeling, world-building and simulation.
*Fiction an extension of childhood play (“fiction is the continuation of the creative play of childhood, not just for the authors but for readers”)
*Characters and action—“mental modeling of people and their doings.”
*Emotions: discussion of empathy and identification, re-lived emotions (from our own life experiences), exploration and projection (Fiction is “the joint creation of the writer and the reader”).
*The effects of fiction: “Can fiction have beneficial effects?” Understanding relationships, interaction with groups, and problems of selfhood. “Transportation” (being “lost” in a book), persuasion and enculturation. (Also mentioned is the related advertisement and propaganda).
*Writing fiction (I admit to skipping this section)
*Talking about fiction. Conversation and reading, book groups…etc.

Oatley writes well and plainly. He brings together scholarly research from around the world and references classics and quotes the words of notable authors when appropriate. There is much in this book to enjoy for those of us who enjoy both fiction itself and reading about fiction—which a kind of literary navel-gazing, don’t you think? There were so many interesting bits, just a few examples: when discussing the idea of reading as a form of self-improvement, “…But the idea that literature might instruct and enlighten has come under suspicion. Part of the devastation of World War II was the failure of the German citizens, one of the world’s most highly educated populations, to prevent their nation’s slide into Nazism.” This, of course, brings to mind current events. There is another brief discussion of the three kinds of stories that are universal: the love story, the heroic story, and the sacrificial story. There’s also the discussion of whether fiction has one meaning or many meanings, and how we make a fiction story our own (that latter bit is psychologically intriguing). And I like the idea that my reading fiction began as child’s play before I could read. Enjoyable and enlightening, this book both confirms some of what we already know as fiction readers, and also gives us plenty to mull over. ( )

Professor Oatley begins from the vantage point that fiction presents opportunities for the reader to ‘model’ or ‘simulate’ worlds. We become partners with authors in a play of fictional actions and emotions that trigger neurons in the very same centres in our brains that would be activated were we to be performing these actions or experiencing these emotions for real. The object of this play is social as we situate ourselves in a social world. And being so, it is at the same time conversational, that being a key component of the social. It turns out that talking about fiction, as readers, is one of the most useful things we could be doing.

Unsurprisingly this is rich ground for a cognitive psychologist and sometime novelist to plough. The main portion of the text sets up the basis for the fiction as simulation theory. Here, every statement seems to be supported by some psychological study. But few, if any, of the supporting materials are challenged. Which may be the way psychologists build positions, seemingly by accretion. For my part, I worry that the conceptual roots of these various studies and theories from the past hundred or more years may not, in practice, cohere so nicely. But perhaps this is merely a way of noting that psychology is not philosophy.

The final three chapters are especially interesting: ‘Writing fiction’; ‘Effects of fiction’; and ‘Talking about fiction’. The first of these provides some practical guidance for potential authors, drawing upon Flaubert’s writing practice. That practice consists in five phases: planning, scenarios, drafts (of which there are many), style, and finally the finished draft. The chapter on the effects of fiction asks whether reading literature is good for you. Oatley treats this primarily as a question about measureable outcomes such as increased cognitive or problem-solving abilities. He acknowledges that in a time of severe pressure on educational curricula, such demonstrable benefits may be essential to sustain literature’s place in our schools. But of course for many, the idea that literature might be good for you is really a question about whether it is morally improving. Here Oatley hands off to Martha Nussbaum’s writing, uncritically, to settle the matter. The final chapter may be particularly interesting to those of us who attend book clubs or participate in online discussions of our reading. Oatley states emphatically: “To talk about fiction is almost as important as to engage with it in the first place” (178). It’s a great statement and I agree with it, naturally, though I would prefer to see much more on the relation between such discussions and the (potential) moral benefits of reading literature. That, however, is not a criticism, merely a wish for future reading.

Although written for a general audience, Such Stuff as Dreams has a vast number of citations in the forty pages of endnotes that function almost as a parallel text. It seems, at times, as though Oatley has canvassed every possible study, monograph, or text at all relevant to his project. Thankfully his twenty-plus page bibliography should provide the keen student of these ideas ample fodder for further investigation.

Finally, it must be said that the editorial staff of Wiley-Blackwell have not carefully proofed the text as numerous distracting typos are present. ( )