My Jewish-American novel class recently finished a book called “The World Without You,” by Joshua Henkin, who is the recipient of the 2012 Wallant Book Award at University of Hartford.

Henkin was asked to speak at Uha on April 17, before receiving the award and answering some questions about his book.

Now, I have only been to two other book signings and author Q&A’s, so I do not have a lot of experience with them. Our class read the book a week prior to Henkin’s arrival and then spent the entire week discussing the book. As part of the general education program at Uhart most students are required to take at least one literature course, where they read books and talk about them in class. So, most people here know, professors and students can look really deep into the book for hidden symbolism and metaphors.

Professors usually ask something to the affect of, “What do you think was the author’s purpose for doing such and such?” They then let students give open-ending answers and speculations as to what they think the author was trying to do or say.

In a typical English class, my Professor Patt did just this. We discussed the reasoning for a female dominated story and symbolism behind the name Noelle in a Jewish novel.

Every time we came up with a question, Patt told us to ask Henkin when he did the Q&A, so we all did, but the answers we got were unexpected.

Basically, he said that most of the stuff that we saw was done unintentionally and he did not intend to do that on a symbolic level: that was just not his style.

Many students in the room, including myself, were surprised at his answers, because this is what we have been taught, there is meaning in every detail, we just have to find it and analyze it.

Most of the books we read in school are written by authors who are no longer alive, so we do not have the opportunity to ask them, “What did you mean by having Hester Prynne wear the letter A?” or “What does the fish symbolize in ‘The Old Man and the Sea?’”

Yes, it is important to think critically about the works we read and not glaze over the material, but sometimes I wonder if we read too much into books when analyzing or discussing them in class. Based on the Q&A with Henkin and some other authors in the past, I have to think no. Sometimes a name is just a name, or a color just a color and nothing more. By assuming that everything means something, scholars make everything meaningless.

The parts the authors actually stress as symbolic or metaphorical might get lost if we try to see meaning in every minute detail. I know I do this myself. I miss the obvious critical details in a book, because I think it is too obvious and not deep enough.

Every book has some sort of message to it and although students and professors might be tempted to always be “looking beyond the surface level” to what is underneath, we miss out on other important elements, like character interactions and the overall theme.

In my experience, some professor failed to give me an understanding of the book we read overall, because they would get too caught up in looking at the little details that they forgot to give an overview of the entire novel.

I think this method can discourage students who have a difficult time identifying the “little details” in a book and make them feel inadequate and lost. Effective teachers and professors use both the inductive, detail to theory, and deductive, broad to detail, methods when teaching. The professors, who implement the inductive approach, sometimes can get so caught up in looking at the individual components of a novel, that they never get to the theory part- or what do all these pieces mean?

So, next time you feel lost in the facets of the book you are studying in class, do not be afraid to ask the professor about the general meaning of the book, because that may be the only thing the author really intended you to glean from the novel.