What the novel does, at its best, is create the conditions for a particular kind of attention — an attention to the texture of experience, to the full complexity of a consciousness moving through the world, that daily life rarely permits.
The serious reader is, over time, a different kind of perceiver than the non-reader. More comfortable with ambiguity. More aware of the gap between what people say and what they feel. Less likely to reduce another person to a type.
For midlife women specifically, the novel offers something that other art forms rarely equal: the experience of inhabiting another consciousness from the inside. Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels give you the experience of being a particular kind of woman in a particular time and place.
The novel is the only art form that grants access to another consciousness from the inside — and the woman who has spent a lifetime reading seriously has inhabited many lives that are not her own. This is a form of wisdom.
Penelope Fitzgerald. Alice Munro. Marilynne Robinson. Toni Morrison. Jenny Offill. These writers do not offer consolation. They offer something better: the sense of being understood by someone who was paying very close attention.