Very often in fiction, inanimate objects simply lie there without doing anything. You'd think they'd be more...lively - that they'd get up and do something!

It happens the novels I love are all about human relationships and whether they are successful or not. Great novelists attempt to explain how relationships work and what life those relationships can give to the soul, or what damage they can cause it.

A marriage at the end of a Jane Austen novel between the two main protagonists is an event truly blessed with happiness, especially when the betrothed have spent the majority of the book misunderstanding each other. The emotional realignments as each comes to understand the other's true feelings reveal almost everything about the two, so that by the time the champagne comes, the reader is as emotionally satisfied as it is possible to be.

On the other hand, when disaster courts the end of a book, it often does so because the characters have either continued to misunderstand each other or, indeed, have intentionally deluded each other. The nature of this lack of good judgment is revealed by the great novelist in all its detail and foolishness.

When Gustave Flaubert's poor Madame Bovary dies, the reader is crestfallen, maybe not so much because of his particular feelings for her, but because her stupidity and self-deception have been so feelingly portrayed by Flaubert. Her self-deception is her character, and it has been revealed entirely.

When Tommy Wilhelm is weeping at the side of the coffin in Saul Bellow's Seize The Day, the reader is the only one attending the funeral who realizes that Wilhelm understands — clearly, finally, on this day — that he is a complete failure. His relationship with his wife did not bring this to him, nor did his relationship with his father, and certainly not his connections in Hollywood. Rather it's the unknown corpse in the coffin with whom Wilhelm establishes the connection that ushers him to his ultimate mourning for himself and his life.

How does the author reveal these things? It's one of the great secrets to the meaning of a great book, and like all secrets, it is many-, many-faceted. The manner in which you describe the things outside of a character, and his surroundings at a particular moment, is one of the ways you can get into his soul.

Inanimate objects, in other words.

You have a scene in which a couple is talking. They're angry with each other. One has betrayed the other, and in the betrayal they've both found things in their own character that are either difficult or vivifying - or both at the same moment. Do you say something as prosaic as "Miriam felt both betrayed and vivified by Eddie's secret"? You could, but then you would have ushered yourself into the centuries-old cathedral of dull writing so filled with past and, especially, present parishioners.