Eucalyptus tree, San Francisco, 2016.

The Clasp
By Sloane Crosley

Beautiful Ruins
By Jess Walter

A recent study by researchers at The New School in New York showed that people who read fiction are more likely to develop empathy for other people. Interestingly, The New School study found this effect in what it termed "literary fiction" but not what it termed "genre fiction." The Scientific American article linked above cites a novel by Louise Erdrich as an example of the former, and a novel by Danielle Steel as an example of the latter. Researchers said that literary fiction emphasizes the psychology of the characters, thus helping the reader to develop empathy, while genre fiction emphasizes plot at the expense of character development. Without that focus on psychology, readers don't have the chance to explore empathy in genre fiction.

That's what the researcher say, anyway. I have read some version of this argument many times over the years. I tend to believe it. It suggests that reading fiction -- one of my favorite hobbies -- is a virtuous thing to do. When I try to consider things from another person's point of view, I often fall back on the tools I picked up from reading fiction.

That said, I am not convinced any one piece of fiction is necessarily better at this kind of thing simply because it's shelved in the literary fiction section instead of in the sci-fi/fantasy section. Think of the Harry Potter series, essentially a middle-grade fantasy series that ends up tackling, in thinly veiled form, racial prejudice and other difficult issues. Surely many people who read those books, either as kids or as adults, and think of Hermione's pain at being called a "mudblood" whenever they hear someone being taunted with a racial epithet. (Many people, sadly, do not. One of the joys of following J.K. Rowling on Twitter is to see her hammer the racists and sexists among her followers, as if to say, "Did you actually read the books?"

This brings up some corollary questions: If we read literary fiction told from the point of view of a selfish jerk, do we develop the tools to deal with the selfish jerks in our real lives? Do we develop empathy for the selfish jerks who are oppressing us? Do we become jerks?

Reading these two mostly enjoyable novels, I often thought about these questions.

Sloane Crosley's "The Clasp" is a mostly comic novel about Kezia, Victor and Patrick, old college friends who are starting to enter their thirties and finding that their old ways of interacting with each other -- or even with themselves -- don't work anymore. Many people go through something like this around that age, when we start to realize that many of the habits and personality traits we developed when we were young don't work as we get into our thirties and beyond.

I'm making this novel sound much more serious than it is. Though it devotes a lot of words to a theme involving the French writer Guy de Maupassant and his classic story "The Necklace," "The Clasp" is actually an almost sitcom-ish story, centered around an absurd quest to recover a lost necklace. There's also a jeweler who makes absurdly expensive works out of old tampons and rat bones, and a self-centered Hollywood screenwriter who has been diagnosed with -- wink wink, nudge nudge -- an undersized heart. (Even the author seems embarrassed at her own metaphor here.) Still, I thought the book was a lot of fun. There are some nicely observed bits of character development, and a scene of misadventure inside a French chateau is hilarious. By the end, I think I started to like Kezia, Victor and even Patrick a little.

Patrick, by the way, is the screenwriter, and his story comes with a portrayal of Hollywood as a pit of narcissism where artistic ambitions go to die. There's a lot of that in Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins," too. If anything, "Beautiful Ruins" is harsher about it than "The Clasp." That's a little weird, considering that "Beautiful Ruins" seems at times like it was written to be made into an epic, multi-decade romance prestige picture.

The novel is partly about the famously troubled production of the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton movie "Cleopatra," but, like "The Clasp," it's also about three aging people who must confront things from their pasts. The trio here involves Dee, an actress, Michael, a Hollywood producer, and Pasquale, the owner of a tiny hotel in a little fishing village on Italy's Ligurian Coast. There's also Claire, Michael's frustrated young assistant, and Shane, an aspiring screenwriter whose bloated sense of self-worth has taken a beating. Oh yeah, and there's Dee's son, who grows up to be something of a Paul Westerberg-type self-destructive rocker, and his long-suffering girlfriend Lydia.

At times, "Beautiful Ruins" seems overstuffed with these characters and their stories, as though Walter tried to cram several novels into one. We even get to read a whole treatment for Shane's screenplay about the Donner Party, the first chapter of Michael's autobiography, a chapter from a war novel written by a guest in Pasquale's hotel, and a long description of Lydia's autobiographical play about her relationship with Pat.

Many of these stories concern men's regrets about how they mistreated the women in their lives. There's nothing wrong with that theme in itself, but it means that Walter ends up sidelining his women characters for much of the novel, or letting their fates be bounced around by the men in their lives. That's a shame, because Dee, Lydia and Claire seem a whole lot more interesting than the male characters. Michael is obviously meant to be a jerk, Shane is portrayed as a spoiled brat who needs to grow up, and Pat is a selfish addict. Even Pasquale, the most sympathetic of the men in the book, is a bit dull.

To bring this back to the issues I raised at the top of this post: I have to wonder, does reading these books make me a worse person?