Like a late victorian clergyman sweating in the dark over his Doubts, I have moments when my faith in fiction falters and then comes to the edge of collapse. I find myself asking, “Am I really a believer?” And then, “Was I ever?” First to go are the disjointed, upended narratives of experimental fiction. Oh well ... Next, the virgin birth miracle of magical realism. But I was always Low Church on that one. It’s when the icy waters of skepticism start to rise round the skirts of realism herself that I know my long night has begun. All meaning has drained from the enterprise. Novels? I don’t know how or where to suspend my disbelief. What imaginary Henry said or did to nonexistent Sue, and Henry’s lonely childhood, his war, his divorce, his ecstasy and struggle with the truth and how he’s a mirror to the age—I don’t believe a word: not the rusty device of pretending that the weather has something to do with Henry’s mood, not the rusty device of pretending.

When the god of fiction deserts you, everything must go. The book-lined church and mic-ed-up pulpit, the respectful congregation, the interviewer’s catechism, the confessions disguised as questions, the reviewer’s blessing or curse. I confess, I’ve been on those panels with fellow believers as we intone the liturgy, that humans are fabulators, that we “cannot live” without stories. You cannot live, priests always imply, without them. (Oh, yes we can.) My heart fails when I wander into the fiction section of a bookstore and see the topless towers on the recent-titles tables, the imploring taglines above the cover art (He loved her, but would she listen?), the dust-jacket plot summaries in their earnest present tense: Henry breaks free of his marriage and embarks on a series of wild ...

This is when I think I will go to my grave and not read Anna Karenina a fifth time, or Madame Bovary a fourth. I’m 64. If I’m lucky, I might have 20 good reading years left. Teach me about the world! Bring me the cosmologists on the creation of time, the annalists of the Holocaust, the philosopher who has married into neuroscience, the mathematician who can describe the beauty of numbers to the numbskull, the scholar of empires’ rises and falls, the adepts of the English Civil War. A few widely spaced pleasures apart, what will I have or know at the end of yet another novel beyond Henry’s remorse or triumph? Will a novelist please tell me why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles, or how morality evolved, or what Antonio Salieri thought of the young Franz Schubert in his choir? If I cared enough about Henry’s gripes, I could read a John Berryman Dream Song in less than four minutes. And with the 15 hours saved, linger over some case law (real events!), as good a primer as any on the strangeness and savagery of the human heart.

Such apostasy creeps into the wide gap that separates the finishing of one novel and the start of the next. It’s less a block than a matter of profound indifference. Happiness is elsewhere. Months can go by, and then there comes a shift, a realignment. It starts with a nudge. A detail, a phrase, or a sentence can initiate the beginning of a return to the fold. It needn’t be brilliant. It only has to exude a certain kind of imaginative warmth.

A recent reversion to faith started with the rereading of two short stories. (There’s persuasiveness in brevity.) The first was Vladimir Nabokov’s much discussed and celebrated “Signs and Symbols.” A crushed elderly couple visits their mentally disturbed son in a psychiatric institution on his birthday. The mother doesn’t wear make-up. Instead, “she presented a naked white countenance to the fault-finding light of spring days.” Perfectly pitched and rhythmically coiled around a muted or modest paradox—spring, conventionally the harbinger of hope, brings only criticism of a personal sort.