The book reads like a novel, and an intense one at that: the characters include Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both of whom would become key writers of their era, both of whom would die by suicide; Maxine Kumin, who would go on to win a Pulitzer; Robert Lowell, who taught Plath and Sexton, and was already hailed as the founder of “confessional” poetry; Tillie Olsen, whose Institute stay would result in her best-known book, Silences, about the forces that kept women from creating; and Betty Friedan, soon to publish The Feminine Mystique, which would galvanize hordes of discontented women who’d tried and failed to be Stepford Wives.Even without having read the book, I'm pretty sure it does not read like a novel. It's a serious archives-based history of The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, which became a home for these women and others. As such, it's most unlikely that it is built on fictional techniques such as interior monologue, imagined dialogue, or invented scenes. That is, it does not read like a novel at all. Characterization, scene-setting, drama, tension -- these things do not make a book "like a novel."
What Atwood means by "reads like a novel," I think, is that it is well written and interesting to read. What she seems to assume, in other words, is that good writing is fiction and fiction is good writing. If good writing is found elsewhere, it is "like a novel," a sort of failed novel.
In other words, those six words are an example of fiction bigotry, the belief that only fiction is good writing, and all literary techniques (even those that began in nonfiction writing) are essentially fictional. Any writing that seems "good" must aspire to be fiction.
Once you are alerted to this, you see it everywhere. "Reads like a novel" is one of the signs to look for. Another is the affirmation that nonfiction is facts, but fiction is "truth." Since I keep meaning to start a list, maybe this example is Number One. Nothing like starting at the very top.
