Recently, I drove into a patch of rainy fog and everything in my head turned clear. A memory came back—gently, vividly—of another rainy drive. This was more than a dozen years ago. Four of us were driving back home to Massachusetts from a family friend’s wedding in Philadelphia. We figured on six or seven good hours in the car, and we’d brought along a number of books on tape. We were listening to Daphne du Maurier’s “My Cousin Rachel.” As it happens, that story, too, opens with a wedding.

The wedding we’d attended had been an auspicious occasion—but not so the wedding in the book. While wintering in Italy for his health, the narrator’s guardian and cousin, an English country gentleman named Ambrose Ashley, had fallen in love with an impoverished contessa, his distant cousin Rachel, and precipitately married her. The joys of married life were destined to be short lived, though, and Ambrose soon sank into a feverish decline and died—but not before scribbling to his cousin back in England a couple of urgent, unsettling, and possibly febrile letters hinting that lovely Rachel just might not be the angel he’d first taken her for.

Both in the book and along the New Jersey Turnpike, it began to rain. One big, whistling truck after another threw a blinding wash across our windshield. The narrator, young Philip, raced off to Italy to investigate his cousin’s death and, notwithstanding his grave suspicions, himself fell madly in love with Rachel. Indeed, he was so besotted that he soon began making plans to transfer his inheritance to her…

Clearly, no good could come of such a plan, and yet the precise shape of the oncoming disaster remained in question. Rachel herself remained in question. Without doubt, she was unwise and credulous in her personal relations—her friend the lawyer Rainaldi was a creep. Or was she in fact a canny soul, and were she and Rainaldi colluding as swindlers and trysting as secret and shameless lovers? In any case, it was a bad idea to put her in charge of any sizable fortune, for she was wildly—uncontrollably—extravagant. Or was she something far worse? Was she the sort of woman capable of killing in order to replenish her purse?

Questions piled up faster than answers, and when, through Philip’s negligence, Rachel plunged to her death off a tottery bridgeway, nobody in our car could say whether she was merely bad news, or truly bad. We were as confused as poor undone Philip, for beautiful Rachel took her secrets to the grave.

“But what was Rachel really like?”

This came from fifteen-year-old Emily, sitting in the back seat but leaning so far forward she seemed almost perched on my shoulder—just where, in Saturday-morning cartoons, the imp Conscience hovers and whispers reproaches into a person’s ear. I replied that perhaps Rachel wasn’t really like anything—that sometimes writers deliberately leave their characters ambiguous. Emily listened patiently as I droned on (I teach undergraduates for a living) and then she said:

“O.K., but what do you think Rachel was really like?”

And I explained that sometimes one of the greatest pleasures in reading is to watch a writer straddle a fence. That my favorite American fiction writer, Henry James, was a master of this, and in his novella “The Turn of the—”

“O.K., but what do you think Rachel was really like?”

Clearly, we each suspected that the other wasn’t being quite logical. From Emily’s point of view, Rachel had either done away with cousin Ambrose or she hadn’t. We might not know the truth about her, but Rachel had to be one thing or the other: innocent widow or scheming murderess.

If at that moment I’d been more articulate, I might have explained to Emily that some of the modern writers I loved best—James and Proust and Nabokov and Cheever—occasionally took enormous satisfaction in the final unreality of their characters; these were creative artists ever yearning to announce that their creations were mere puppets and that the one living soul inside their homemade theatre was the writer, the puppetmaster. And if Emily had been more articulate, she might have spoken of the godlike power of authorial creation: a writer assembles a stick figure, she puts some flesh on its bones, and then she breathes upon it tenderly, as you would upon a nest of twigs and pine needles when you’re building a fire and you’re down to a single match, enkindling a life destined to move into clearings far beyond its maker’s ken.

Had I been still more articulate, I might have said that there’s a special readerly pleasure in approaching a book as you would a box. In its self-containment lies its ferocious magic; you can see everything it holds, and yet its meagre, often hackneyed contents have a way of engineering fresh, refined, resourceful patterns. And Emily might have replied that she comes to a book as to a keyhole: you observe some of the characters’ movements, you hear a little of their dialogue, but then they step outside your limited purview. They have a reality that outreaches the borders of the page.

We were somewhere north of New York City (“To Kill a Mockingbird” had replaced “My Cousin Rachel”) when I connected Emily’s remarks to “Gone with the Wind.” I’m told that a national debate arose soon after the book was published. People all over America asked: Did Rhett abandon Scarlett forever? Or did the two of them eventually reconcile?

I’d long considered this whole debate deeply silly. Wasn’t it obvious? Rhett and Scarlett didn’t do anything after the last page. With the novel’s close, they ceased to exist… But, of course, it was obvious only if you were approaching the book as a box rather than a keyhole.

The interstate eventually gave way to traffic lights and the rain-beaten, red-brick factories of Holyoke, Mass.; we were nearly home. It occurred to me that in time Emily inevitably would learn to savor the literary critic’s pleasure in tiered discourse—a line of analysis which continually shifts from the puppets on the stage to the person manipulating their strings. This would be standard procedure in most of the literature courses she’d take in college, and if the terminology of literary criticism was often bloodless and pretentious and ugly, its underlying pleasures were authentic and profound.

No, there was no need to worry that she wouldn’t acquire sophistication. The thing to worry about was that in learning to read like a critic she would lose the ability to read as a child—for that’s every legitimate critic’s worry. The child glances at a puppet and instinctively inserts into its wooden chest a miniature, fervent, tripping heart. And on this wearying rainy day’s drive, here was Conscience serving to remind me that the child’s trick is greater than anything the puppetmaster can offer: it’s the pulsing one out of which all of fiction’s magic flows.

Brad Leithauser is the editor of “The Norton Book of Ghost Stories.” His new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” will appear next February. Read his pieces on The Turn of the Screw” and “David Copperfield.”

Illustration by Roman Muradov.