The Art of the Word

I am always floored by good writing. The art of putting together vibrant, intelligent, meaningful sentences to create a compelling and thought-provoking whole is inspiring, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. But those fiction writers who use their prose to create characters and draw up plots that immerse me in a wholly separate world are special. While those worlds are totally separate from my own, these authors make me feel like I could be part of it.

It also amazes me how such authors can use different approaches to bring their conceptions to life. I recently read three novels, all New York Times Notable books, whose authors took distinctive paths to telling their stories, and yet managed to construct an engaging narrative. As someone pretty much stuck in one format, this inventiveness is stimulating. If they can do it, why can’t I? Talent?.

The first of the novels was “Trust” by Hernan Diaz, a work in four acts which was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The first hundred pages are a novel inside a novel. It is written almost as a biography, very flat and matter of fact. Part 2 appears to be the outline of an autobiography and seems to have only limited connection to the first segment, though I have no doubt a more astute reader would have picked up on the links.

Part 3 makes the connection between the first two segments clear and makes you go back to rethink what you’ve just read. It also introduces a wholly different voice and style. The 4^th narrative is a diary which sheds light on all three of the segments that precede it. It’s only then, in the last 40 pages, that the true arc of the story becomes clear.

There are pluses and minuses to this approach. I found it hard to care about the characters until the third segment. They were only interesting in retrospect. However, once they were rounded out by the subsequent narratives, they acquired new resonance. It’s a question of whether you are willing to stick with the opening segments to get to the pay-off.  

Tana French comes at it from a totally different direction. If you have ever read any of her Dublin Murder Squad series, you know that while she writes thrillers, she is more interested in character development than plot exposition. All her novels explore the psychology of her police protagonists, focusing as much on their inner lives as on the crime they are investigating.

In her recent novel, “The Witch Elm”, which is not a police procedural, I was struck by her ability to quickly and succinctly define her “hero”. The first 29 pages of this 500-page book introduces us to the lead character, who is also the narrator. Even though little of import happens in these pages, by the end of the first chapter you feel you know this person. You sense his charm, his devil-may-care attitude arising out of a life where everything has worked out to date, and his moral relativism, born of the same. Plus, some subtle foreshadowing lets you know that all of this will be challenged in the pages ahead.

French’s first-person narrative approach adds another layer to your confrontation with this character. You are getting a feel for him through his recitation of events. While he seems sincere and honest, you cannot help but question whether he is reliable. You take it in while wondering whether you are being led down a garden path. It makes for a great start to a psychological thriller.

The third book in this trilogy, “Go, Went, Gone” by German author Jenny Erpenbeck, takes a dangerous approach to structure. It is clear early on that Erpenbeck not only wants to write a novel, but she also wants to educate the reader about the plight of refugees in Germany. She chooses to do so through the eyes of a retired philology professor, even though his experience is miles away from theirs.

Not far into the novel alarm bells go off. Are these refugee narratives depictions of actual events presented in a novel format for the sake of accessibility? Was license taken to make them more dramatic? Are we supposed to relate to the professor and mirror his journey of discovery about the Kafkaesque world of these displaced persons? Does the author believe that the reality of these refugees can only be made affecting through western eyes?

For the most part Erpenbeck is able to pull this tightrope walk off. She makes the professor a real character, so we care about his interactions with the emigrants. The refugees come across as humans, not caricatures. Still their stories tend to run together, making it hard to remember one individual from another as the book progresses. Plus, it all wraps up a bit too neatly. Yet by the end you feel the author has generally succeeded in bringing some light to a difficult topic, while presenting an engrossing story.

Each of these approaches has its strength and weaknesses, but what struck me was the willingness of these authors to take chances to tell the stories envisioned. Diaz risks keeping you in the dark through a fairly mundane opening hoping you will stick around for the payoff. French risks telling you to much, to early, hoping that the character is interesting enough to hold your attention for the next 470 pages. Erpenbeck risks alienating readers who find the secondhand presentation of the refugees plight troubling.

It is those very risks that make a book “notable”, and worth reading. A straightforward narrative is all well and good, and can be very satisfying if well executed, but a steady diet of that approach can be stultifying. We need authors that defy our expectations, take us out of our narrative comfort zones and force us to consider stories from different perspectives. It engages the “critical” area of our brain that weighs and evaluates the stories that we hear on a daily basis. And that can’t be a bad thing.