As the title suggests, this work focuses on what we can say about human nature from an evolutionary perspective and what that tells us about our impulses towards storytelling and our love of fiction. The main point is that humans have evolved as intelligent, highly social creatures with strong drives to be interested in the minds and actions of others, and that fiction in its various forms serves as a form of "cognitive play" that allows us to indulge and exercise those interests, practicing our social understanding and problem-solving abilities in much the same way that a cat plays by practicing its pouncing. Boyd maintains that understanding fiction in this way can lead us to take new perspectives on human storytelling, including making central the question of how authors work to capture their fellow humans' attention by sparking off those innate interests.

All of which sounds like extremely rich territory to explore, but I have to say that I didn't really find this nearly as fascinating or full of new insights as I'd expected. Which I think may be due in large part to not being the expected audience for this book, coming as I do from a science, rather than a litcrit background. Boyd's main theses sound very nearly self-evident to me, but he spends a lot of time defending them from expected (and, I'd guess, correctly expected) criticism and hostility from those invested in current notions of postmodernist literary "Theory." Really, much of what he has to say about the way in which such folks think about fiction is so ridiculous in my view that if I hadn't myself dipped a toe or two into the subject in the past, I'd assume he was just setting up straw men, but sadly I think I do know just enough about it to know that that's probably very much not the case.

Boyd also provides a couple of examples of what he thinks it looks like to view literary works through this kind of evolutionary perspective, using two familiar but almost amusingly different works of fiction: The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who. To be honest, I found his discussion of The Odyssey rather tedious. He seems to be belaboring much the same points about it over and over, none of them very vividly or in a way that seems incredibly valuable, so I'm not sure it's doing any favors for his idea that this is a useful way to approach things here. The chapters on Horton Hears a Who, on the other hand, were surprisingly interesting, made some better points, and even taught me a few new things about Dr. Seuss. ( )

Readers rejoice! You may be among the fittest members of the species. The author is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In addition to being an expert on Vladimir Nabokov, he is also a great fan of scientist and militant evolutionist Richard Dawkins. He’s combined his passions for literature and evolution into an evolutionary explanation for fiction and a new technique for literary criticism.

He starts his book with the question that many of his readers are bound to ask, what does telling stories, which the teller and the audience know aren’t true, have to do with biological success? How can deliberate falsehoods be the basis for a more successful organism? Boyd carefully and logically, based on scientific evidence, builds his case, and it’s a fascinating one. Noting that individual organisms are at an advantage if they look out for their own interests, he also notes that groups of organisms also have a better chance of survival if they cooperate. So both selfishness and altruism are products of evolutionary economy. Humans are not the most successful predators when they hunt alone armed only with a spear, but a group of cooperating hunters can heard the prey into an enclosure and have a very successful hunt. Humans, an “ultrasocial” species in Boyd’s words, therefore gain an advantage by being interested in the doings of other humans. We watch them their body language to search for clues to determine what they might do next. And we, like many other animals, love to play. It gives us pleasure.

“Pleasure is nature’s way of motivating creatures to perform an activity now—and in the case of play, to expend energy eagerly in mastering skills and acquiring strengths that they may need later in urgent or volatile situations, in attack, defense, and social competition and cooperation.” (page 179)

Art, Boyd argues, is a form of cognitive play. Playful thinking, which is enjoyable, enables us to do better at practical thinking and problem solving. Storytelling with its pleasurable patterns and its ability to describe the motives and beliefs of multiple characters allows us to be better cooperators and competitors.

In the last part of the book Boyd turns his new method on two very different works of literature, the Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who! It certainly gave me a whole new way of appreciating the artistic devices and appeal of the two tales. ( )

Interesting ideas but badly written and overly dense - really hard going. Best to skim where you can and focus hard on other bits. ( )