A review by mcatsambas
Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks

3.0

I thought this book was going to talk more about the real-life consequences of the "abuse of narrative" like people falling prey to dangerous totalitarian narratives. It did not. It mentioned that at the beginning and at the end, but it was mostly a lofty literary analysis of narrative and novels. I did like the point that novels help us understand truths about life that are hard to glean from real-life living, particularly through experiencing the subjectivity of a fictional character which is impossible to do with other people IRL. There was also a discussion at the end about narrative in law which at first I thought was dumb because it seemed to ignore the fact that students are taught about crafting their side's "story" of the case in LRW class, but it made the interesting point that the whole legal system is buttressed by a narrative that the Constitution is the end-all be-all, so SCOTUS opinions have to say things like "this outcome inevitably came from the Constitution" (even if it didn't) in order to be credible. Overall narratology seems like an interesting but narrow discipline.