Who gets to tell their stories, and who is supposed to read them? In her new essay collection, “How to Read Now,” Elaine Castillo dismantles the notion that art should be separate from the artist, because our understanding of where a story comes from, and who is telling it, matters.

In the essay “Reading Teaches Us Empathy, and Other Fictions,” Castillo slowly eviscerates the writing of Peter Handke, the Austrian writer who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is no knee-jerk cancellation — Handke supported the former Yugoslavian president and war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and denies the Bosnian genocide. In fact, it’s not a cancellation at all because Castillo is not telling us not to read Handke. But she is telling us to read him differently, and she does this through unhurried, laser-sharp and devastating line readings, skewering the idea that his work is apolitical, some sort of blank canvas upon which to project man’s existential longings and loneliness. Not only is this an inaccurate reading of his novels, Castillo argues, but it is a privilege that writers of color are rarely afforded, because the idea of universality in literature — the notion that certain books speak to all of us and the human condition, apart from any political or historical context — is usually reserved for white writers and their expected white readers.

“This kind of nonpolitical storytelling — and the stunted readership it demands — asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal,” Castillo writes. “I’m the last person who would ask us to read less, to remove authors like Handke from our shelves, but we have to push back against the idea that engaging with our art in ways that look beyond the aesthetic is a cheapening of our engagement.”

It’s a simple, profound point.

In the same essay, one of the most powerful of the eight in the collection, Castillo also takes aim at the idea that reading fiction increases empathy, seeing this as lazy and transactional, forcing writers — usually writers of color — to do the work of “educating” readers. Reading fiction does increase empathy — but the research around this focuses on how the reader interacts with a narrative voice, and how that engagement and interaction are critical. Castillo’s point is that reading cannot teach empathy because that implies that the story is doing all the work, not the reader. If you are only viewing books as a delivery mechanism for different perspectives, to be spoon-fed like a tourist, that’s a big problem. But if you are reading books as Castillo exhorts us to read, not from a “I feel your pain” perspective, but from the idea that this story is your story, too — it is part of the world we all inhabit — I believe you will be a better person.

Castillo, who is Filipino American and grew up in Milpitas and whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines, was the kind of kid who read everything and realized, early on, that she was not the expected reader. Whether it was a Joan Didion novel churning out cool observations about exotic locales, or a story that suddenly felt the need to opine on the importance of having a Filipino houseboy, she felt like an interloper, stumbling upon a conversation she wasn’t supposed to be part of. “When artists bemoan the rise of political correctness in our cultural discourse, what they’re really bemoaning is the rise of this unexpected reader. … someone who does not read them the way they expect — often demand — to be read; often someone who has been framed in their work … as an object, not a subject,” Castillo writes. When I think of my own childhood reading, vast and weird like Castillo’s, I know that as a white kid growing up in New York City, more books held my hand than hers. I was the expected reader. I hold that idea, in its gemlike precision, as I read now.

In “The Children of Polyphemus,” the final essay of the book, Castillo examines Homer’s “The Odyssey.” In perhaps its most famous passage — Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops, Polyphemus — Castillo turns the scene on its head, arguing that it is Odysseus who barges in on Polyphemus, hiding in the corner to spy and judge while the shepherd “sat and milked the ewes, and bleating goats in order, putting her young to each. Next he curdled half the white milk, and stored the whey in wicker baskets, leaving the rest in pails for him to drink for his supper.” Here, Castillo writes, is “a radiantly quiet, private scene of a solitary man at work, right in the middle of all the tiny, daily tasks required to build a decent life.” Odysseus — warrior, raider, leader from an ancient line — sees none of this. But the reader can.

Castillo quotes the poet Horace, who writes of Homer, “You tell of the … battles fought under the walls of sacred Troy. But you are silent about the price of a barrel of Chian wine; you do not tell who will heat the water for my bath, or … where I shall be offered shelter from the Pelignian frosts.”

It matters who draws the bath, and that is Castillo’s point. Even if that person is invisible, unmentioned or does not speak, that person matters.  Their story is your story, too.

How to Read Now
By Elaine Castillo
(Penguin Random House; 337 pages; $26)