Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

“The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of “What Happens There,” an essay D’Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D’Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the “lyric essay,” a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D’Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

If this face-off between a meticulous establisher of truth and a bold champion of poetic license strikes you as a bit contrived, then I say: well spotted! A provocative excerpt from the book appeared in Harper’s last week, featuring each man performing his role to the hilt. Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.

This excerpt is not a fair representation of the book, but then the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process. The impression has been given that Fingal is a paid fact checker for Harper’s, the magazine that originally commissioned D’Agata’s essay. Actually, he was an intern for the Believer magazine, a literary journal that picked up the piece after Harper’s declined to publish it and that encourages its interns to volunteer for ambitious projects and pursue them independently. When Fingal tells D’Agata, early on, “It’s the job I was assigned to do, so I have to do it,” he is — ironically enough — not being strictly accurate.

Any lingering impression that Fingal is a put-upon toiler in the boiler room of journalism dissolves as he introduces more and more tedious digressions and unfunny wisecracks into an ever-burgeoning pissing match. Many of Fingal’s quibbles — such as asking D’Agata for notes on a guided bus tour he took as a college student in 1994, or insisting that the mountains southeast of Vegas look “brownish” to him, rather than “black” as D’Agata described them — are so over-the-top that the writer’s snappishness becomes understandable.

Fact checking, contrary to vague popular perceptions, is something of an art; not only does each publication have its own policy for substantiating facts, but each checker has his or her own approach. Nevertheless, there are many constants. Fingal’s method is eccentric, to say the least. For example, he tracks down and transcribes the National Institutes of Health’s definition of a drug that one of D’Agata’s quoted sources mentions only in passing, yet he never seems to have contacted any of the sources themselves, either to check their quotes or to verify their titles or biographical details. Much of what he does is unnecessary by even the most rigorous of magazine fact-checking standards (and glossy-magazine fact checking is as rigorous as it gets), and yet he neglects some basic techniques of verification.

D’Agata is no better advocate for his position. He offers the “rhythm” defense more than once, and when Fingal raises legitimate questions about his attempt to present suicide as a universal taboo across cultures and historical periods, he stoops to the retort, “Wow Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine.” (Although it must be said that this is a pretty fair characterization of the tenor of their arguments.) It’s not until late in the game that D’Agata engages Fingal in a substantive discussion of what he’s trying to do, best stated as “taking liberties” to make “a better work of art — and thus a better experience for the reader — than I could if I just stuck to the facts.”

The bonehead comments-thread response to this assertion is “There’s a name for that: fiction.” But there are enough confirmed facts in “What Happens There” — real names, people, places and events — that it doesn’t constitute fiction, either. Of course, the whole dispute could be fairly easily defused by labeling D’Agata’s work as a lyric essay and including an editor’s note (for the many readers as yet unfamiliar with the genre) explaining that it contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material. That describes most contemporary poetry, after all. A magazine like Harper’s might decide that it isn’t comfortable publishing prose works of this kind, but no reader could claim to have been misled.

Such a reasonable solution, however, would severely reduce the opportunities to grandstand about how today’s readers don’t “have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,” and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?) D’Agata’s rhetoric in this section of “The Lifespan of a Fact” is so overblown in comparison to the substance of his quarrels with Fingal that the effect is comical. The freedom to remove a “clunky” comma from the name of a school or to “streamline” quotes from a newspaper interview seems unlikely to catapult a piece from a pedestrian bit of reporting to a “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made for what D’Agata wants to do, and in his defense he maintains throughout “The Lifespan of a Fact” that he doesn’t claim to write “nonfiction” or “journalism,” and has never espoused or promised factual accuracy in his essays. However, he is (in “What Happens There”) writing about the death of a real person, a boy named Levi Presley, and Fingal suggests that the “gravity” of this subject urges greater fidelity to accuracy in each detail. D’Agata replies, “The important thing here is the search for meaning … I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”

Here is the crux of the matter and one in which fact checking plays an overlooked role. When I first read “What Happens Here,” long before I became aware of D’Agata’s provocateur status, I could barely finish it, and abandoned the rest of the book. The authorial voice was insufferable — preening and self-important. Many writers are indeed vain, but the good ones are able to keep this from infecting their work. Vanity has the effect of blinding an artist to the very truths D’Agata intends to pursue.

No genre scourges a writer’s delusions of grandeur and omnipotence more fiercely than nonfiction. The fact checker is its whip. Yes, as Fingal discovers in the final pages of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” even official records can contradict each other and sometimes the truth is impossible to determine. But most of the friction between D’Agata and Fingal in “The Lifespan of a Fact” doesn’t involved disputed facts, only aesthetically inconvenient ones. D’Agata would prefer that his interpretation and depiction of reality not be encumbered by having to accommodate such facts. He thinks his essays are better because he refuses to do so.

What effect does it have on a writer to be constantly confronted with facts that interfere with his or her stories about the world? It can certainly be maddening, as many a writer subjected to the ministrations of an overzealous fact checker can testify. It can mean 30-minute conversations about utterly meaningless quibbles. Fact checkers can also save your ass, a service that may not mean much to someone like D’Agata, who doesn’t care about being accurate, but which I have deeply appreciated every time I’ve benefited from it.

Mostly, however, fact checking — not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it — makes you pay more attention to the world around you. It compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value.

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters aren’t subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it’s good for you.

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is the result of intensive, immersive observation over the course of four years in the life of a Mumbai shantytown called Annawadi. Boo’s technique is as exhaustive as it is self-effacing. She conducts countless hours of interviews with her key “characters,” interviews that, to judge by the results, can be as searching as therapy sessions. She backs these up with documentary research and shoe leather reporting. To establish what actually happened during a crucial event — the self-immolation of a one-legged woman following a dispute with one of the book’s central families — she interviewed 168 people, many of them more than once. She never mentions herself.

It’s tempting to compare the resulting narrative, seamless and intimate, to a novel, but since the reading public appears to be allergic to fiction about people like the Annawadians — poor, foreign and dark-skinned — that would hardly do it justice. This is a scrupulously true story, and therefore comes to us with an added luster of authenticity. But unlike most reporting on the poor, foreign and dark-skinned, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” mightily resists the urge to treat any of the half-dozen principle characters as examples of their class. The whole point of the book, as Boo states in an interview with her editor included as an afterword, “is to portray these individuals in their complexity — allow them not to be Representative Poor Persons.”

Who are they? Most of them are members of two families, each led by an indefatigable but flawed matriarch saddled with a weak spouse. The Husains are Muslims, migrants from northern India, who have built some modest security for themselves in the trash-picking trade, largely through the sharp eyes and diligence of the oldest son, Abdul. The other clan is Hindu and led by the formidable Asha, a ruthless fixer who aims to make herself the “slumlord” of Annawadi via her connection to the Hindu nationalist political party, Shiv Sena (a sort of Hindu Tea Party). Supporting characters include the bright and curious Sunil, a boy of indeterminate age, who sells his scavengings to Abdul.

Abdul is the quintessential head-down striver, while his brother Mirchi — in whose education the family has sunk a lot of its resources — dreams of “wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel” like the ones attached to the nearby international airport. For her part, Asha has raised a beautiful daughter, Manju, who promises to be the first female college graduate from Annawadi, though she’s too tender-hearted for her mother’s tastes and dreads being married off, as planned, to a boy from Asha’s home village. Still, Manju’s lucky compared to her spirited best friend, Meena, whose Dalit (untouchable) family beats her every time she presumes to question their orders or plans for her.

The Husains’ fate takes a turn for the worse when they decide to spend some of their new disposable income on a tile floor for their shack. (The “Beautiful Forevers” of the book’s title refers to a repeating ad for similar tiles, posted on the wall that screens off the slum from the airport road.) Their neighbor — the one-legged, man-crazy and quarrelsome Fatima — virulently objects to the noise, and the ensuing dispute ends with Fatima setting herself on fire after promising to “put you in a trap.” In the hospital, she accuses the Husains: first of burning her, and then of compelling her to burn herself. The case plunges the family into the nightmare world of Indian law enforcement and jurisprudence.

The charge is ridiculous, but this system, which for several years consumes much of the family’s time and nearly all of its money, is less a method of controlling crime and enacting justice than a vast bribe factory for the officials within it. Corruption and cronyism run and shape the world of Annawadi, from the thugs who extort protection money from rag pickers like Sunil to the nun who takes expired food donated to her orphanage and resells it to street merchants. In one of the book’s most eloquent ironies, Manju has to give up teaching the makeshift English classes she’s been offering to the local children because she’s too busy helping her mother administer an entirely fictional network of kindergartens funded by a Western nonprofit.

Boo mostly refrains from generalizing commentary; that’s part of what allows “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” to hug its subjects as closely as their monsoon-drenched hand-me-downs. But when she does choose to pull back a bit, it’s to comment on how magical thinking and conspiracy theory flourish in a world this arbitrary and unjust, a place that so glaringly lacks “a link between effort and result.” A string of deaths in Annawadi are attributed to a curse prosecuted by Fatima’s ghost, and above all, “powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked … Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously with one another for spoils.”

You can see why some of the people Boo writes about give up, but what’s more striking are the ones who don’t. Abdul in particular makes for an arresting figure, a man struggling to work out the pattern of a virtuous life in an immoral world. Little Sunil cases the city outside Annawadi with an eye to unexploited opportunities. Manju joins a civil defense network so she can study the manners of its middle-class members. By the time “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” winds to a close, it seems almost unbearable not to know whether any of them will succeed. We can’t. What happens next can’t be told because it’s still happening, right now.

I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book — although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad’s system-wide “pinch to expand” feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother’s pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, “I’m trying to read the story!” (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

Attempts to invigorate books with video and other digital bells and whistles keep bumping up against this fundamental problem: You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.

The latest crop of enhanced e-books struggle mightily to overcome this dilemma. The vast majority of such books are kids’ titles, for the simple reason that literature for young children has always included images. The pictures give kids something to look at as the books are being read aloud to them, and this helps cement the relationship between printed and spoken language. Every children’s e-book offers a read-aloud feature in which a recorded voice recites the text. Most offer the ability to tap individual words to hear them spoken aloud. Parents understandably believe that these apps will help their kids learn to read — and that they make tempting, but still educational, alternatives to television.

The most celebrated children’s e-book at the moment is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore,” an app created by the Louisiana-based Moonbot Studios. “Morris Lessmore” is also a film, one of the five nominated for best animated short in the 2012 Academy Awards. It’s about a boater-wearing bibliophile who gets blown by a hurricane to a magical library where the books fly around like birds and quote their most famous lines. It’s not much of a story, but it looks fabulous. Nevertheless, you can tell a medium is in trouble when artists in some other form start making gooey nostalgic tributes to its inherent “wonder.” Although “Morris Lessmore” is sort of an e-book, it’s mostly a movie, apparently because only a movie can do justice to the glory of reading.

Moonbot’s follow-up, “The Numberlys” is even more gorgeous than “Morris Lessmore.” A visual tribute to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and set in a colorless, industrial world of numbers, it’s about five homunculi (looking just like the little men holding hands around the edges of Chinese pincushions) who invent the alphabet. “The Numberlys” allows its “reader” to help in this manufacturing project by shooting projectiles, bouncing objects and spinning devices to fabricate each letter. What the app illustrates is that the more sophisticated an enhanced e-book becomes, the more closely it resembles a game. Text is even more marginalized in “The Numberlys” than it is in “Morris Lessmore,” and while the result is charming, no parents should kid themselves that it will help teach their kids to read; it’s more likely to teach them how to play “Angry Birds.”

By now, the theory that the novel of the future will be a game has become almost venerable. That’s despite indications that — as the critic and author Tom Bissell pointed out in his book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” — narrative and interactivity are in fundamental respects incompatible. Where games offer the pleasure of mastery, narrative offers the pleasure of surrender. You can beat “Halo, ” but you can’t win “To Kill a Mockingbird”; the notion doesn’t even make sense. A “Hamlet” in which Hamlet can blithely decide to kill his uncle as soon as his father’s ghost tells him to is not “Hamlet,” and, furthermore, not that interesting. Part of the power of that story is its feeling of inevitability, the understanding that each event follows from those preceding it and ultimately derives from the nature of each character.

This potent sense of causality, along with a subtle balance of expectation and surprise, is the great storyteller’s secret weapon. When you find yourself caught up in a story like a swimmer in a riptide, unable to tear yourself away, chances are you feel immersed in another world. You know it’s not real, but somehow, for a while, it has become far more palpable than the reality around you. You can almost see the characters, feel the cold wind on their faces, hear the pursuing footsteps of the villain, and your heart speeds up. You may even become oblivious to your immediate surroundings. (Video games can create a similar sense of immersion via different means, which is one reason why the two are sometimes confused.)

Narrative constructs this alternate reality in your imagination, and narrative sustains it. What matters is not the story on the page — or the screen — but the story in your head. Interactive baubles pull a reader’s attention back to the screen, serving as a reminder of the thing you want to go on forgetting: the fact that all of this is just made up, words on a page. Some enhanced e-book publishers have cottoned onto this problem and as a result they’ve moved away from inserting video or clickable illustrations into their books, and in new directions.

Take, for example “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” an iconic Sherlock Holmes story frequently chosen by e-book enhancers as a giveaway to demonstrate their wares. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works are in the public domain.) Recently, I read the story three times, in three different enhanced formats.

The first, a Vook edition, represents one of the earliest stabs at an enhanced e-book. It presents the complete text with interspersed videos offering background information on Baker Street and Holmesian detection techniques. Some of these mini-documentaries are narrated by a man wandering around the streets of London, inexplicably dressed in formal evening wear and top hat and looking like a music hall performer, but you can’t expect “Masterpiece Theatre”; a problem with adding videos onto books is that it’s expensive to produce. Some of the videos are interesting, but only after you’ve read the story, which means there’s no particular reason why they should be packaged with it.

A newer company, BookTrack, dispenses with video entirely and sells books with accompanying soundtracks that keep time with your reading. If it’s a dark and stormy night in the story, the soundtrack plays rain effects. BookTrack’s accompaniment to “The Speckled Band” mostly consists of crackling fires, ticking clocks and chirping birds (for the scenes in the countryside). This is pleasant enough, but once I slipped into the tale (which works surprisingly well even when read three times in a row), I largely ignored it. Perhaps this indicates a kind of success — at least I wasn’t distracted from Holmes’ exploits. On the other hand, I was so intent on the old house of my imaginings that I didn’t need creaking floorboards and footsteps to make it more present. And as someone who resents overbearing movie soundtracks instructing me on how to feel about every scene, the music was simply obtrusive.

The most enjoyable version of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is published by Byook (I know, I know). It’s sort of an adult picture book that features both BookTrack-style soundtrack and marginal illustrations that soak into the page over the course of a minute’s reading. These reminded me of the elaborately decorated editions of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books passed down to my siblings and me from my father’s parents; hovering at the periphery of my vision, they really were atmospheric without being distracting. And because Conan Doyle’s story hangs on the layout of a room and of the rooms along a creepy corridor, a couple of the illustrations were actually helpful. An abridged version of the original story (heretical to purists, but I can’t say I minded), the Byook “Speckled Band” also features some fine original full-screen art in a style resembling paper cutouts, a little like the full-page plates routinely found in print novels during Holmes’ time.

Being shown the floor plan of the Gothic Stoke Moran manor house isn’t essential to understanding “The Speckled Band,” but it didn’t pitch me out of the imaginative space of the story, either. To the contrary; having to puzzle too hard over the text to visualize the configuration of a scene (as I did when I first read the story, at age 12) can sometimes break a story’s spell. When an author’s fictional world is very complex, and spans several volumes — as is the case with, say, George R.R. Martin — it’s easier to see how an enhanced e-book can help sustain the illusion of an alternate reality, rather than undermining it. Martin’s U.K. publisher, HarperCollins, has just come out with an enhanced e-book of “Game of Thrones,” with maps that track the characters’ movements and a glossary so readers can look up any character whose identity has temporarily slipped their minds — Martin has created over 1,000 of them.

For the most part, though, fictional narratives, when they work, don’t really need digital enhancements. When they don’t work, the enhancements can’t save them. Suzanne Collins’ series “The Hunger Games” seems piercingly vivid to her millions of young (and not so young) readers, even though none of the print editions of the books have contained a single image of her heroine. An expertly told story is all the enhancement most works of fiction require.

But, of course, not all books are fiction or narrative. It’s with nonfiction — a vast category of books, unfortunately defined by what it’s not — that the enhanced e-book offers the most thrilling potential and the most illuminating accomplishments. I’ll be taking a look at those next week.

Tests like this, the couple asserts, do students “a double disservice: first, by inflicting on them such mediocre literature, and second, by training them to read not for pleasure but to discover a predetermined answer to a (let’s not mince words) stupid question.” The problem, they feel, stems from the standardized testing regime, which forces the learning experience into a too-rigid structure. Even a “banal” story like this tiger-cub number admits “multiple interpretations,” and the prod to “reduce the work to a single idea” does a disservice to both reader and text.

I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).

As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful: “to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.

If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.

In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare) is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum). If you’ve ever turned on the option that lets you see other readers’ highlights in a Kindle book, you’ll find that they almost always underline similar mottos, such as this line from Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.”

The weakness of this approach to fiction should be obvious: If what you really want is a set of fortifying maxims, why bother with stories about feckless romances or foolish kings? Why not just go straight to the self-help section — the secular equivalent of the sermon — as so many American readers already do?

Others (including, recently, the novelist Philip Roth) reject fiction entirely and turn to history or narrative nonfiction, explaining that, at the very least, they can be sure they’re “learning something” from what they read. Learning can certainly be fun, but the implication is that acquiring facts about, say, the life of Cleopatra, has more value than following the story of an imaginary person like Elizabeth Bennet. The Precious Time thus passed away has something to show for itself, and the American mania for self-improvement has been appeased. Never mind that most of us will find little practical use for information on quantum mechanics, the military stratagems of World War II or the private lives of British aristocrats.

Ultimately, all of these attitudes — and the standardized tests that Stone and Nichols complain about — boil down to the belief that reading can only be the means to an end, whether that end is moral betterment or worldly success (two classic Puritan preoccupations). For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit. Like any art, it can teach or motivate, but it doesn’t have to, and it’s often better when it doesn’t.

Further reading

Ann Stone and Jeff Nichols on their twins’ third-grade reading test for the New York Times SchoolBook blog

Philip Roth says he’s stopped reading fiction

By Lester’s own admission, “Da Vinci’s Ghost” is fairly speculative. What we know of the master’s inner (and external) life comes largely from his notebooks, around 30,000 manuscript pages containing many sketches and observations, but also constituting, in large part, the most impossibly ambitious to-do list of all time. Da Vinci embarked upon a comprehensive study of human anatomy (among several dozen other disciplines) in the late 1400s, and part of that project consisted of obsessive comparative measurements of various parts of the body. The text accompanying the Vitruvian Man mostly lists his findings for the “ideal” body, including such stipulations as “from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the height of a man,” and so on.

The transcendent meaning of the drawing is implicit (and perhaps occasionally imagined). Lester eloquently proposes the Vitruvian Man “as a study of human proportion; as an overview of the human anatomy; as an exploration of an architectural idea; as an illustration of an ancient text, updated for modern times; as a vision of empire; as a cosmography of the lesser world; as a celebration of the power of art; as a metaphysical proposition.” “Da Vinci’s Ghost” teases out the threads of these ideas from the centuries of Western culture that preceded the moment when Leonardo set pen to paper. The result is a short but dense book that dips into mysticism, military engineering, the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, the theory of sacred geometry, Medieval medical education, the construction of Gothic cathedrals, and more. Although Leonardo may not have acknowledged them, according to Lester, all of these cultural forces and legacies came to bear on the creation of the Vitruvian Man.

He gets his name, by the way, from Vitruvius, a Roman engineer and the author of a text titled “Ten Books on Architecture.” Vitruvius maintained that the proportions of a building should be derived from and based on the proportions of a “well-shaped” man. Such buildings in turn make up the body of an empire, in a classical version of the Medieval and Renaissance conception of universe as a multilayered reiteration of a single divine pattern. The idea that “the human body was a scaled-down version of the world and the cosmos as a whole” is, as Lester notes, “an age-old philosophical conceit,” but with the Vitruvian Man it appears before us as the most beautiful and triumphant expression of the school of thought known as humanism.

Like last year’s “Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt, “Da Vinci’s Ghost” celebrates the emergence of humanism in 15th-century Italy. Both books are predisposed to the popular narrative in which the Renaissance is depicted as a revolution against Medieval thinking rather than an evolution from it, and this is regrettable, but Lester is a lot less guilty of it than Greenblatt.

Lester draws into his story such figures as the 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Under the influence of what are now thought to be severe migraines, Hildegard saw visions, including the recurring image of a human figure in the middle of a “wheel of marvelous appearance,” with its head touching the top of the circle and its feet touching the bottom. This, Lester suspects, shows the influence of Vitruvius’ book (preserved in monasteries like the one Hildegard presided over), which maintained that the ideal human form, when placed in such a circle, would fit perfectly, with its navel at the center. A similar symmetry can be found by placing the same figure within a square.

For Hildegard and Medieval thinkers, the body at the center of this geometry was Christ, the intersection of the human and the divine. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, however, is decidedly human, if magnificently so, with square and circle superimposed. “The figure,” Lester writes, “captures a hinge moment in the history of ideas: the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of … everything.”

Leonardo, that consummate polymath, has become yet another symbol of this humanist aspiration, while illustrating, at times, its downside: “He set himself to learn many things,” wrote Georgio Vasari, his 16th-century biographer, “only to abandon them almost immediately.” (Still, for all his frustrations, he did pretty well for himself in the end.) We can’t know what the master was thinking when he drew the Vitruvian Man, but Lester, who is forced by the thinness of the historical record to guess at many things, seems least speculative of all when he looks into the Man’s intensely concentrated features and sees a resemblance to his creator. Reaching for the edges of the cosmos, seeming to fly and stand firmly planted on the ground at the same time, he’s a creature whose limitations are their own form of glory.