“What has been my habit, I suppose for many years, is to read one work of a writer whom I have heard of as being worth reading. That’s how I get to a book, and when I read one book by a writer, I’m satisfied. I don’t have to read four of them to form an opinion. For example, we’ll take some of my contemporaries like William Faulkner. I read one book of Faulkner which I liked very much. I …
A friend who is writing a complex book on evolution has been inspired by watching his artist daughter screen-printing layers of a picture. Successively using different colors, the image gradually emerges organically as a whole. He’s realized he needs similarly to line out his ideas slowly, giving readers the tools necessary to understand his theory’s major revelations deep into the book. This works better, he says, than “describing each of the parts separately in detail, which just doesn’t work.”
Narrative literature must bring readers along, too, and for similar metabolic reasons. Multiple storylines are a commonplace in drama and comedy—watch almost any movie—and sometimes there are current-action threads while past threads move, in sequential flashbacks, toward the present. We wonder, How did that screwed-up guy or gal get there?
I’ve struggled with tugging along more than two storylines, however, in a book-length work. I can keep the main narrative unfolding across many chapters, maybe with a related subplot—a reappearing villain, say—but want to tie off other threads as they arise. Introduce them, wrap them up, get them over with. Snip! This is because I feel I’m already doing a lot in a chapter, and shoving one more thing into it seems to imperil its shapely arc. Sometimes, I think, a thread must be used in a discrete heap. But maybe then it’s not really a thread? And too much of such summary turns narrative essayistic, in the old-fashioned sense—bloodless.
I like narrative, event sequence leading to incidents that culminate in a big incident. But readers need to experience, with the main character or characters, all threads develop if they are going to feel the emotions the writer desires. This is how it happens in life too: ongoing issues and layers of backstory keep moving into the present. Rarely does something arise out of nothing. The car with bald tires wrecked at least partly because you were broke because of your troubled friend and because, two years ago, your dumb brother-in-law got you a deal on those tires, a deal, you learn, that really benefitted him . . .
Not especially funny or witty myself, perhaps that’s why I admire those who are: I must have opened my blog a half dozen times today to read a first sentence by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. Then tonight I read it—again—to my wife and laughed, again. It’s one of the wittiest sentences I’ve ever read. Lane’s follow-up quip is pure gravy. “It got a rise out of Dinty, too,” I told Kathy. “He left a comment today on that …
The sex life of Grace Kelly, like the home life of the Incas, is one of those distant but down-to-earth matters which we can investigate in depth, and muse upon at length, but never really hope to understand. According to some observers, she herself may not have grasped its implications; in the words of a columnist at Photoplay, “I wonder if Grace Kelly knew she had so much S.A.” To which the only proper response is, W.T.F.? The quote is …
The New Yorker online recently excerpted a passage from Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City concerning a man who believes his mind to be controlled by the magazine’s font. This mention allowed The New Yorker to reveal: “Fiction editor Deborah Treisman expounded a bit on the font (it’s ACaslon Regular), and how it factors into the story selection process: Often when we’re reading stories, and thinking about them and editing them, we’ll say, ‘Let’s go ahead and put it in …
William Styron creates dreamy world in his slave rebellion novel. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. Eventually I realized that William Styron’s poetic descriptions of weather and landscapes in The Confessions of Nat Turner aren’t supposed to represent the world as we know it—or even as the characters know it, save perhaps for the narrator, Nat Turner—but to create a feeling in the reader of tragic grandeur, of a doomed place saturated with significance and …
William Styron’s great novel showcases the strengths of lavish, incantatory words and sentences. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. William Styron told interviewers he worked slowly, writing his thick books by hand, in No. 2 pencil, on yellow legal pads. In Sophie’s Choice his alter ego reads his sentences aloud, testing them, as he goes. Styron had an ear for rhythm and a fearsome vocabulary that he wasn’t afraid to unleash. The lovely word motes …