“Ute’s books, Odessa,” by Alec Soth, from his series I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating © Alec Soth/Magnum Photos

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up following along, which seemed to me a good way to connect people in isolation. But there were disagreements. Someone complained to a friend of mine that she didn’t see why I bothered to read Tolstoy, who was a “patriarchal figure.” An acquaintance told me that I did not need to read Tolstoy to feel like a writer. Feel, I marveled: What did she mean? It was baffling that people would feel strongly about what I did with my reading time; it was as though someone took personal offense that I often eat broccoli.

Later, at a writers’ festival, I gave a talk on what I’d learned from reading War and Peace. Afterward, someone who had been in the audience asked me if I knew anything about Tolstoy’s life. I did, as I had read his biography and visited Yasnaya Polyana, his estate outside Moscow. “He was an aristocrat!” the woman said. “He had servants. His wife served him. He was a horrible man!” Another attendee pointed out that I was peddling an outdated canon written by dead white men. “My job is to dismantle your canon,” she said, to which I replied that perhaps in order to dismantle something, she might want to know a little about it in the first place. Emotions escalated; an impassioned and teary speech was given, pointing out my wrongheadedness.

The sentiment of both young people was this: How dare I—a woman who is not white—keep reading Tolstoy, a flawed man who would not live up to contemporary moral standards? A more public outcry has broken out recently regarding the writer Alice Munro, who failed her daughter after she had been sexually abused by Munro’s second husband. Readers and educators expressed ambivalence about reading or teaching Munro again. There is something mind-boggling about this rush to censure. One has the urge to tell these people, Not everything is about your feelings. One wants to question those educators about their syllabi: Do you teach only those writers who are saintly and flawless human beings?

When I was growing up in China, writers and educators were often called the engineers of human souls. Once, infuriated by her unruly students, our second-grade teacher gave a speech on building our “personal dossier.” On the day we were born, we each had been assigned a dossier by the Communist Party, into which everything that happened in our lives would be recorded. She outlined what would be included in the dossier: the backgrounds of our grandparents, parents, and relatives; all the grades on all the exams we took; things we said to one another; our good and bad deeds. Everything, she assured us, would go into the dossier. And through every turn of our lives, she stated with gravity, “Someone will be checking your dossier. Remember, your entire history is known. You have no way to hide anything.” What my second-grade teacher outlined, it turns out, was not just a Communist hell, but a vision of our world today.

If someone decides not to read Munro because she enabled an abuser, or Tolstoy because he was an aristocrat and a patriarch, I would understand. What doesn’t make sense is the idea that, because one has denounced Munro or Tolstoy, others must agree that it would be wrong to read them. When writers confront me in these situations, I tend to shrug them off: some people have a natural tendency to police other people’s thinking. But I admit that I worry when the younger generations use language that they have taken from public circulation without thinking it through first. Phrases like “dismantle the canon” may sound fabulous, but if you were to press the students to elaborate, you would get a string of grandiose and empty words.

Thinking through—rather than just thinking—is important. A thought or an idea is never that precious. People have thoughts and ideas all the time, many of them preliminary. Sometimes people mistake their feelings for thoughts and ideas, which are in turn mistaken for absolute truths. The point of writing and reading fiction is not to stay with the first thought or idea, nor the third or the fourth, but to push further until one says to oneself, Even though I haven’t thought through everything, I have brought myself as far as I can within my limited capacity. Without thinking through, thoughts are no more than slogans.

I have been thinking recently about Nikolai Rostov, Tolstoy’s young hussar. Even as a longtime reader of War and Peace, I’ve been surprised by this preoccupation. Though he is an important figure in the novel, Nikolai is a lesser character than the book’s two protagonists, Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky.

One could describe Rostov as handsome, cocky, athletic, reasonably artistic (he sings and dances well), unintellectual (he is seldom seen reading a book), deeply romantic (he experiences some of the most intense and thrilling romantic feelings that occur in the novel: his one-sided pining for the tsar and his falling in love with Sonya, his cousin and childhood sweetheart, after she dresses up as a young man, complete with a mustache drawn on with burnt cork). He is a brave soldier, a loyal friend, a prodigal son (who nevertheless matures and takes on the family debt), a loving brother, a minor scoundrel toward Sonya, a solid family man for his wife and children.

The problem with these descriptions is that they might lead readers to dismiss Nikolai as predictable—there is nothing transcendent about him. To make the case for Nikolai’s significance is to make the case for minor characters. In fact, I would like to argue that most of us in life are in positions close to those occupied by the minor characters in War and Peace (and there are nearly six hundred of them). Very few of us are the Napoleons or Kutuzovs of our time—a comforting fact. Some of us have a bit of Pierre in us, or a bit of Andrei, or a combination of both. Many of us would like to believe that we, the protagonists of our own stories, are also the protagonists of something far grander. (Years ago, when I was in the Chinese army, Gone with the Wind was a popular novel among my fellow teenage soldiers, and I was shocked to find that nearly everyone in my platoon thought herself a Scarlett O’Hara.)

Andrei comes into War and Peace with a fully formed self, and he spends the rest of the novel refining that self, always reaching for higher ground in both the spiritual sense and the worldly sense of power and fame. Pierre comes into the novel with a vague but ambitious vision for a better world, and he spends his time bumbling around trying to understand the falsity and the limit of each rendition of that vision. Both have their moments of epiphany: Andrei while lying on the battleground under the lofty sky of Austerlitz; Pierre while looking up at the Great Comet of 1812.

Andrei and Pierre are more extraordinary men than Nikolai. And yet, the longer I read War and Peace, and the older I get, the more I appreciate the space Tolstoy has given Nikolai, not Andrei or Pierre. Nikolai is introduced as a young man who enlists in the Russian army in imitation of his best friend, Boris. His first few months in the military resonate with any fledging young person seeking a loving home. After a fellow officer steals from one of Nikolai’s friends, Nikolai, who raises the alarm, is punished for smearing the reputation of the regiment. At his first encounter with the French, Nikolai is shocked to find that the enemy really means to kill him. “Who are they?” he wonders. “Why are they running? Can it be they’re running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” Nikolai, Tolstoy writes, “seized his pistol and, instead of firing it, threw it at the Frenchman, and ran for the bushes as fast as he could.” A masterstroke from Tolstoy: the loss of innocence in wartime is a cliché. Instead, Tolstoy describes Nikolai’s return to innocence, throwing a pistol and running for the base like a boy on the playground.

After Nikolai is injured, he briefly questions why he has chosen to join the war effort, but the doubt does not linger. He is one of those men who do not seek an elevated understanding of life, and he will remain free from that urgency. In a sense, he is a man without an epiphany.

Nor does Nikolai think much about the political environment in Europe, as Pierre and Andrei do. While on leave, he goes out carousing, gambling, visiting prostitutes, not necessarily because those behaviors are his essence, but because everyone in his circle is doing the same thing. Pierre engages in those activities, too, but he yearns to be elsewhere. Nikolai blends in. He is not idealistic enough, dreamy enough, perceptive enough, or imaginative enough to want a different life.

Many other things happen to Nikolai, as life happens to a person. He blunders, he hurts others and himself, he protects a few people within his power, he accepts some consequences and moves on from others, he adapts to his environment as it changes, and eventually, he makes relatively good use of the life he chooses, taking on responsibilities, becoming the best possible version of himself. Never hankering for the ideal or the perfect, Nikolai, in the end, achieves something essential: human possibility. Put in a realistic perspective, most of us are likely the Nikolais of the world, so it’s important to ask: What happens to Nikolai Rostov in our contemporary setting, both in literature and in life?

Let’s suppose that literary characters—protagonists, antagonists, secondary and tertiary characters—have to audition to enter a writer’s work. (I’m borrowing this concept from the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who talked about having his characters “audition” to be the narrator of a novel.) For Henry James, characters lacking Jamesian subtlety are likely to fail the audition. For Maxim Gorky, characters who don’t comfortably inhabit their designated garments—heroes! martyrs! villains! oppressors!—are turned away. Hemingway’s characters wouldn’t pass Woolf’s audition, and vice versa.

An interviewer asked me about my story collection recently: “You bear down beautifully on the interior lives of your female characters. Do you find male characters more challenging? If so, why?” I replied that I have written novels with male protagonists and that, no, I don’t find male characters challenging; it just happens that the stories in my latest collection are primarily about caretakers: mothers, daughters, sisters, and nannies.

Most writers have a system of auditioning their characters. But some writers are less stringent about what kind of characters they admit into their fiction. Tolstoy, Balzac, and George Eliot are a few who come to mind. One can expound upon their auditioning systems, but I want to return to Nikolai Rostov. Would he succeed in his audition for a place in contemporary fiction?

Once, a student of mine turned in a story featuring a young husband in a dispute with his wife. Quickly some of the students gave their verdict on the husband: toxic masculinity. Was that it? I tried to find different ways to talk about the character, but once the verdict was given, the case was closed. This tendency to issue a judgment seems to be on the rise. Stories are reduced to situations: this story is about grief, or trauma, or injustice. Characters become types or categories: a mourning mother, an abusive spouse, a traumatized child, a struggling artist, a marginalized soul. The word “identity,” which haunts the discussion of literature, has done some damage.

Recently I assigned “Wants,” a short story by Grace Paley, to my undergraduates. In the story, the narrator runs into her ex-husband, and they have an exchange about the failure of their marriage, among other things. A student called the first-person narrator a passive character. Passive, Paley’s narrator? I tried to suppress my shock and asked how the impression of passivity was conveyed. The student replied that the narrator does not fight back when her ex-husband blames her for the divorce; she even agrees! Another student pointed to the sentence in which the ex-husband says to the narrator: “I wanted a sailboat . . . But you didn’t want anything.”

There: if a man says that a woman wants nothing, then she must want nothing; if a character does not want anything, she must be passive. The student failed to notice that the narrator goes on to list all the things she does want:

I want, for instance, to be a different person. . . . I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up. I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one.

This was a crystallizing moment in my teaching career: what afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity. If conviction—instead of clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives via muddled thinking, repeated questioning, and a tolerance for not knowing and not understanding—is the goal of reading and writing, then much is already lost.

For this reason, I’m afraid Nikolai Rostov may not have a place in contemporary literature. He is not ambitious enough to be Andrei; he does not suffer the spiritual and intellectual struggles that beset Pierre; he is heroic in the war but does not show any signs of trauma; he is aware of his not being entirely honorable toward Sonya, but he doesn’t seek redemption. In short, putting him in a contemporary novel may confuse readers: What kind of message does a man like Nikolai convey?

One can imagine that Nikolai might fare better as a minor character, though he would have to make do with showing only a small part of himself, instead of the whole given by Tolstoy. He could be what my students call a character of toxic masculinity, or a teenager singing the tune of Werther, or the fellow soldier of a protagonist who has experienced wartime traumas and epiphanies; or a farmer plowing in the field, whose only salient trait is that he loves his dogs and his children. The fact that he is all of the above does not necessarily help him. If Alice Munro, a real person, can face only a polarized judgment between being a saint or a sinner, what chance does a character stand?

In a sense, what causes Nikolai to fail his audition is his verisimilitude. He is an everyman. Tolstoy has a passage that summarizes Nikolai’s position:

A soldier in movement is as hemmed in, limited, and borne along by his regiment as a sailor by his ship. However far he may go, whatever strange, unknown, and dangerous latitudes he gets into, around him—as for the sailor always and everywhere there are the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship—always and everywhere there are the same comrades, the same ranks, the same sergeant major Ivan Mitrich, the same company dog Zhuchka, the same superiors. A soldier rarely wishes to know what latitudes his whole ship has gotten to . . .

Nikolai lives in a novel set in one of the most dramatic moments in history. He goes where that ship takes him, without any intellectual curiosity about what is happening beyond his immediate apprehension. Perhaps what makes Nikolai fail his audition is his being among those characters who don’t particularly aspire to revolutionary, rebellious, or transcendent heights; all he wants is to make life a little better for himself and for the people around him. Things happen, and he reacts, either by not changing or by changing just enough.

It is hard to find a companion character for Nikolai in contemporary literature. The closest example I can think of is William Stoner, the protagonist of John Williams’s 1965 novel, Stoner. The book follows the life of a Midwestern farm boy who becomes an undistinguished professor of literature. Like Nikolai, William Stoner is too serious about living out his share of life to be made into a laughingstock; too earnest to be a cynical protagonist who can be shielded by being prematurely disillusioned; and of course there is no chance for him to be a banner-bearing hero.

Characters like Nikolai and Stoner, who react to life more often than they “take action”—whatever that term means—are often labeled by my students as passive characters. Sometimes a student is advised by his or her peers to give characters “higher stakes” or “more agency.” This tends to lead me to groan internally. Isn’t living from day to day enough of a stake? Isn’t living itself the most important action, if you really pay close attention to the world?

When I was young, my father taught me that one needs to eat, at each meal, only until one is 60 to 70 percent full. I suspect this advice was rooted in his frugality and practicality: he came from a stock of poor mountain peasants in southern China. I followed this advice without question until I met my husband, who, also from a poor background, was horrified. “You’ve never eaten one full meal?” he asked me. But is 60 to 70 percent full not full? We can only say it’s not 100 percent full.

My father also taught me something else, which I later recognized in a Song-dynasty poem. He estimated that we find life—people, situations, conditions—below our expectations 80 percent of the time. The two lines from the poem, roughly translated, read thus: “Eight or nine out of ten things in life won’t be to your liking, / and yet you can speak about no more than two or three with others.”

It feels to me that the Song-dynasty couplet makes an effective argument for how different kinds of fiction can be written and read. (A disclaimer: the scientist in me is acutely aware that this discussion is a simplification of a complex issue, and that the numbers I use are hypothetical.)

Let’s suppose experience falls into three categories. An author can write about the 10 percent of life that meets or exceeds expectations on any one dimension: the heroic, the romantic, the exotic, the adventurous, the wealthy, the carefree, the good, the right, the triumphant, the hopeful, the loving, the virtuous. Fiction thus written, catering to some readers’ need to dream or to escape, is necessarily entertainment.

An author can also write about the 20 percent on the opposite end of the spectrum. When something is obviously bad (think about what we’ve read about in the news over the past decade or two: wars, atrocities, corruptions, privations, injustices of all kinds), verdicts are readily available, and readers will not suffer confusion. I’ve seen fiction written in this way, with the quality of a composition in C major: certain and decisive. (There are, we know, masterpieces written in C major.)

A more successful formula than the previous two: one can draw from both the top 10 percent and the bottom 20 percent. Here adversities can be easily defined and displayed, and protagonists can occupy the top 10 percent in their various traits. Well-written books with this formula are likable and admirable: they offer a taste of real life that one wouldn’t call escapist; they offer opportunities for triumphs, hopes, and epiphanies.

When my students demand more agency and higher stakes, it feels to me that they are hoping for such a story, geared toward the 10 percent and the 20 percent on the opposite ends of experience. Not all books written with this formula are propaganda, but clear-messaging fiction begets clearer-messaging reading.

The writers I read and reread, however, belong to the group who write about the 70 percent in the middle. Chances are, they themselves are complex figures; for instance, Tolstoy or Munro. But they are also writers who understand my father’s two lessons. Being 60 to 70 percent full can be considered somewhat full. Suppose that a fraction of those who approach any situation with an all-or-nothing mindset understand the importance of being somewhat full; suppose that a fraction of those in the habit of demanding that things and people meet their expectation understand that 80 percent of the time, they will be disappointed, their feelings potentially hurt. That does not necessarily elevate their moral authority or give them the right to hand out easy verdicts. Suppose a fraction of them learn something from my father’s two lessons. The world may become a more civil place than it is now. Not a civil place—the world may never achieve that—but more civil.

Let’s return to Nikolai Rostov, who has failed his audition for a part in contemporary literature. But literature is only one reason that his failure should worry us. If teleported to this moment, where would the characters of War and Peace find themselves in America? Andrei would likely become a leader of a progressive or revolutionary movement. Pierre would be an intellectual and an activist. Natasha, Nikolai’s sister, who in the novel has much more modern ideas as a woman than others do (for instance, she insists on breastfeeding, to the horror of her milieu), would remain herself; she would not be out of place in the twenty-first century. Boris, an adept opportunist, would need to change only his outfit to become a modern politician. Bilibin, a witty and cynical diplomat who in the novel spends much of his energy inventing “mots” for circulation, would be a quintessential influencer. But where would we find Nikolai? He would be among the population in the middle who decide the result of every presidential election in America.

Here again let me turn to the 70 percent rule. For any society, regarding any proposition, the population will spread out on a spectrum: 20 percent will strongly disagree, 70 percent will be more ambivalent, and 10 percent will be in total agreement. Someone falling into that 10 percent may feel that the rest of the population fails to meet their expectations. Those 20 percent on the other side, one suspects, will not change their minds, and we are hemmed in by them. And yet it may not be wise to treat the middle 70 percent as though they were the same as the 20 percent. Giving Nikolai Rostov, who is among those in the middle, an easy verdict does not make the world any better. It only grants the 10 percent who hand out such verdicts the illusion of power and righteousness.

Long before Natasha and Andrei fall in love, Nikolai meets Andrei at the front. Andrei, knowing that he himself is the superior man, holds Nikolai in contempt, and yet Nikolai “was surprised to feel that, of all the people he knew, there was no one he so wished to have for a friend as this hateful little adjutant.” Nikolai will never reach Andrei’s heights, and yet it’s highly unlikely that Nikolai will stoop to the level of Anatole Kuragin, a depraved man, or that of Ippolit Kuragin, a brainless creature. The 70 percent in the middle have the potential to shift toward something better, so long as the 10 percent do not hold them in utter contempt because they don’t meet their expectations.

If, in every class I teach, one out of ten students leaves with a habit of asking themselves, Can I live with the fact that 80 percent of the time life will not meet my expectations? Can I tolerate this ambiguity, both in literature and in life?, I shall say to myself, I have done my job. If in every class I teach, one out of ten students leaves with a deeper understanding of Nikolai Rostov, with a realistic recognition of human possibility, I shall say to myself, Well done.