REMEMBER WHEN NOVELS USED to run front to back, straight through, in order, from A to Zed? When narrative was a seamless continuum of story that connected the dots and didn’t leave you dangling, except at the ends of chapters? When only Burma-Shave signs had gaps in between? Man, are you old. My advice? Get over it. Mr. Dickens has left the building.
Oh, you can still find novels that read like novels, very linear and all present and accounted for. Lots of them, actually. It’s just that so many novels are told upside down and backwards in a mirror that we almost don’t notice.
Ever picked up a “novel” only to find it’s a collection of short stories? What’s up with that? Stories are stories and not chapters, right? We’re being cheated somehow by a bunch of semirelated, autonomous, short narratives getting hooked together by a “novelist” too lazy to do the job properly! That about the size of it? I’ve heard this complaint many times in class, often in quite heated tones. Here’s my advice: put a cool compress on your forehead and relax. This trend has been going on for a while now and probably won’t be going anywhere soon.
One of my favorite writers of these composite novels (I wish I could claim the term, but it’s Joanne P. Creighton’s) is Louise Erdrich. Beginning with Love Medicine, she has written a series of hilarious and heartbreaking novels of life in and around a Chippewa reservation in the upper Midwest. Her own tribal affiliation is with the Turtle Mountain Chippewa of northernmost North Dakota, right up by the Canadian border. The novels’s various stories, and indeed the publication order of the books themselves, often violate chronological order. Love Medicine, for instance, should be the penultimate novel in the cycle, but it was the first to appear. In it, the narrative begins with a story in the “now” of the novel, the early 1980s, when the death of June Morrisey Kashpaw sets the plot in motion, then jumps back to 1934, when the old people of the tale were young and relationships were being forged. There are similar jumps in chronology, point of view, and voice, with the principal storytellers being Nector and Marie Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine, and their great-nephew/grandson (it’s a maddeningly tangled family tree), Lipsha Morrisey. But some stories are told in the third person, and a few shift midway. Clearly, the traditional three unities of the theater—time, place, and action—have taken a powder.
So why tell a story this way? Well, why not? I mean that literally. Why not? There’s nothing magical or sacred about any organizing principle, and that most certainly includes chronology. We may be accustomed to it more than to any other method, but it’s only a convention, and those exist chiefly to be ignored. The thing that should never be ignored is narrative logic, and that leads us to . . . the Law of Narrative Unity: The best way to organize a novel is the way that makes the most sense for that particular book. No universals here. The only unity a novel has is whatever the writer imposes upon it and the reader discovers in it.
So why is this form of unity right for Love Medicine? You’d have to ask Erdrich, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t tell you. Writers are funny that way. I can’t say for sure, but here’s what I think. First of all, it’s a group novel. That is, the story and the outcome matter both singly (Lipsha, for instance, very much wants answers to his questions) and collectively (these people are related by blood, personal and group history, geography, and shared suffering). There is also the matter of collective knowledge—and ignorance. In any real human society, some people hold certain information, some hold other information, but no one holds all of it. And all of them together? You’d think that you would merely have knowledge by accretion, that collective knowledge would be the sum of all individual knowledge, but while that may be true, there’s also collective ignorance, that the sum of what individuals don’t know, or choose not to reveal, adds into the group’s information database. And to a great extent this novel, and each novel in the cycle, relies on what people do not know as much as what they do. A third-person narrator, particularly one approaching omniscience, would know and reveal far too much. The two people who in some ways matter most, moreover, the deceased June and the notorious Indian activist Gerry Nanapush, are never given their own chance to narrate their stories. Why? Because what counts most in those stories is what other characters make of them. To see the various uses to which those two life stories are put, we need to hear from other characters but not from June and Gerry. This is a trick Erdrich seems to have learned from Faulkner, who knew, for instance, that Caddy Compson remains a much more vital and intriguing figure if she never explains herself but is instead interpreted by brothers Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. Erdrich, in fact, appears to have learned quite a lot from the great Mississippian, while avoiding some of his more overwrought linguistic tics. Those are some reasons we can extrapolate from observable effects in the novel, but there may be one more. I once heard Seamus Heaney say that he didn’t have a long poem in him, that he was not made for epic or extended narrative verse. This is not, I believe, a fault; if one can write lyric poetry as he can, one needs no other arrows in the quiver. It may be the same for Erdrich, that she is most attuned to short bursts of narrative, most comfortable assembling those pieces into coherent, if discontinuous, wholes.
If that’s the case, it applies to quite a lot of her contemporaries. Tim O’Brien has made a career out of cobbling stories together into novels, most famously in his two Vietnam novels, Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. He has said that writing in shorter, self-contained units has several advantages. For one thing, stories (unlike chapters in some novels) have beginnings, middles, and ends and thereby give emotional satisfaction to readers. Writing story-chapters also allows him to publish pieces ahead of the novel’s appearance, allowing him to gauge readers’ response and offering the chance to make money on the stories themselves. A warning here to budding writers: there are so few paying venues for short fiction these days (even compared to when O’Brien made those comments in the 1980s) that this angle is not a strong rationale for this mode of writing. I don’t want to set up any false expectations. We see it in that other O’Brien, Edna, in her alarming In the Forest. The main character, or perhaps main focus or inquiry, is a seriously unhinged young man who commits multiple murders. For good and sound reasons, we’d rather not spend any more time inside his head than we must, so it falls to others to report his conduct and that of the village that creates him.
These novels are many things, but cookie-cutter is not one of them. You’ll never think, “This was built from a kit.” Precisely because each one needs to justify itself, to establish its unity in its own way, each one is unique. And that goes for novels by the same writer. One of my favorite practitioners of the mode is the English Julian Barnes. He made his name in this country with Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), about a doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, whose life story suspiciously resembles that of Emma Bovary’s hapless husband, Charles. The novel is filled with Braithwaite’s mini-essays, personal reminiscences, pet peeves, jokey lists, and even a parody final examination. It has really only one conventionally narrative chapter, called “Pure Narrative,” and it is heartbreaking indeed. One sees in that chapter why the main character must approach his issues indirectly, through the filter of Gustave Flaubert and especially his two signature works, Madame Bovary and the short story “A Simple Heart.” The novel establishes its unifying rationale through Braithwaite’s psychological needs and intellectual defenses. His subsequent work, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), is much less character-driven and indeed proves resistant to classification. Is it a novel, a set of essays and narratives, a collection of short stories, or what? I tend to follow the writer, and since he says it’s a novel, that’s okay with me. Even when he returns to character-driven fiction, as in Arthur and George (2005), a tale of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement in righting the judicial wrongs done to George Edalji, who was improperly committed in a case of animal mutilation early in the last century, Barnes shies away from the sort of conventional narrative favored in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. The pressure of the tale—from event to accusation to trial to conviction to appeal to eventual vindication—pushes the novel toward linearity, toward, in fact, the detective story, yet Barnes, who also writes detective fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, understands how to exploit the genre without sliding into it. The tension between expectation and performance adds to the drama of the narrative: we know what the Holmesian version of this would sound like, and this isn’t it. Rather, it’s something far richer, far more capable of complexity and nuance, yet still possessed of the same urgency as the best detective stories.
You know by now that I’m a fan of slightly deranged narratives. One of my favorite creators of same is the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson. Poet, Gracie? Yes, very much so—poet, musician, memoirist, essayist, fabulist, novelist. Plus, in poetry he’s almost normal. A lyric poem is a lyric poem in his hands, but a prose narrative? Almost unclassifiable. Sometimes more than almost. The Star Factory (1997) may be a memoir, but it’s a memoir like no other, combining personal experience of growing up in Belfast before the Troubles and of life there during them, industrial history, local legend, etymologies, and meditations on the sign system of his father’s glowing cigarette tip in the darkness. When he turns to more purely fictive material, as he does in Fishing for Amber (1999), the weave is just as complex, bringing together tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, usually ribald in the retelling, Irish fairy stories of a particularly dark cast that generally focus on abduction and hazard, wild tales of painters and painting from the Dutch golden age. The book is quite beyond genre. Carson subtitles it A Long Story, which is undeniable. It is book-length, fictive, and somewhat unified by subject matter, theme, and form. Is that a novel? It sounds like one, sort of. Is it as unified as we would like a novel to be? That depends on who’s doing the liking.
And this brings us to the problem of definitions: What is a novel? What do we mean when we call something a novel? Can we find agreement among our various expectations? How important is a story through-line? How much thematic or topical unity is sufficient?
Of all the vexing questions about the novel, and they are legion, the most vexing of all is also the most basic: what is a novel? It’s the discussion that every instructor dreads, and it almost always begins in the negative: Love Medicine (or Winesburg, Ohio or Flaubert’s Parrot or Go Down, Moses or, well, take your pick) isn’t really a novel, is it? And so always, you’re off to a bad start because there’s that disapproval in the discussion; novels are novels, the comment seems to say, and you’re pulling a fast one here. The question, moreover, is loaded with assumptions and embedded answers: “I know what a novel is, we all know what novels are supposed to have and do and be, and this ain’t it, Chester. Now, weasel out of that one. If you can. Which I doubt.” Yea, verily, the instructor rarely can, because the person who poses the question has already made up his mind. The work in question will never be a novel. Now here’s the interesting part: when you get right down to the discussion, the students won’t all agree. Neither will professors, but, happily, they rarely show up in multiples in the classroom. The question, or challenge, however, presumes a single possible answer—this is what a novel is, accept no substitutes. Yet the novel, or rather, The Novel, is almost nothing but substitutes. We can set up a side-by-side taste test to show the problems.
Maybe the divide isn’t that clear-cut, but it does exist in readers’ minds, as any teacher of twentieth-century fiction can tell you. And the Ur-novel of column A does exist, with innumerable avatars. All of George Eliot, for instance, or William Dean Howells. Or John Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett or Stephen King or Agatha Christie or Tony Hillerman or J. K. Rowling. Yes, Harry may be a most unconventional boy, but he exists in a highly conventional novel structure. The school-year story arc of each novel makes it ideal for a front-to-back chronological treatment, and it lends a good deal of unity. Chapters have their own pattern of rising and falling action, with plenty of cliff-hangers. Good guys and bad guys are at least as clear-cut as in any Dickens novel (where appropriate cheering and jeering is also invited). This makes sense, of course, in the case of novels for young, inexperienced readers, for seekers of mystery or suspense (where telling tales out of order is really not playing the game), for all those readers of genres that rely on the if-then nature of their universes. And there’s a lengthy pedigree back to at least the nineteenth century. The Harry Potter books are, in fact, the most Victorian novels I know of. They even, as the series progresses, have the size to prove it.
Which (form, not length) is my point. What we think of as an immutable truth of the novel—this is what novels have always looked like and what they should look like—is actually a historically and economically conditioned form. As I suggested in the extremely abbreviated history of the novel earlier, the nineteenth century, particularly in Great Britain, capitalized on a unique moment in economic and publishing history to try an experiment: serial publication of novels. What we think of as the great fiction of the Victorian era—Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Great Expectations, pretty much the lot, right up through Tess of the D’Urbervilles—first saw daylight either in the pages of a weekly or monthly magazine or paper or, wonder of wonders, as a stand-alone series of monthly installments that would be boxed and available at the bookseller’s stall. They’re not all the same as a result, but they contain some conspicuous similarities. They’re long (even the short ones). They’re linear. They follow the fortunes of a single hero or heroine, with side trips into subplots on figures of slightly lesser interest. They have emotionally satisfying resolutions that often neatly wrap up every narrative thread (of that, more anon). They tend to employ one of two narrative viewpoints: first person (for the novel about a person growing up) or omniscient (for everything else), both of which work swimmingly for well-padded, three-decker novels. And, on average, they’re wonderful, if a little slow for contemporary readers. All these things work well for narratives that stretch out for a couple of years at the rate of two or three new chapters per month.
But here’s the thing: they’re the new kids, the result of cheap paper and inexpensive book production. And what we think of as this “new” phenomenon of novels told out of order has a fairly impressive lineage. Faulkner and Hemingway, to name only two . . . or even Chaucer and Boccaccio. I know, I know, those last two guys weren’t novelists, but you get my point. Discontinuous narrative has been around for a while. And not just in The Canterbury Tales and the Decameron. Ancient Irish epic, for instance, mixes prose sections with verse sections and shows a pronounced tendency to jump around narratively. We can even go back further, to Homer. The Iliad is told in a pretty straightforward manner, from the withdrawal of Achilles in a fit of pique to the death of Hektor. That makes sense: it’s a series of causal connections, in which this decision prompts that response leading to the next action and so on. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is told in a more roundabout manner. Telemachus goes searching for his father, visiting Nestor, another of the Greek heroes at Troy, and others to gather information. That father, Odysseus, meanwhile is ordered to leave the nymph Calypso, with whom he’s been cohabiting for several years (it’s a hard life), and when he pitches up at the Phaeacian court, he tells the tale of the last ten years, of all his struggles and adventures. This approach also makes sense: his journey involves far more random wandering and far less causal linkage than the story of Achilles’ wrath. It’s a narrative instance of horses for courses. One tells the story one has in the way that fits one’s material, whether the story is by Homer or Orhan Pamuk. Human beings have always, as nearly as I can discover, had access to both continuous and discontinuous narratives, and the novel is no exception. Today we can find many novels that would read perfectly for a misguided Victorian whose time machine plopped him down in the year 2000-something, but many more of which he could make neither heads nor tails. How did it come to this? Well, you may not have noticed, but it was ever thus. We can go back to Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy (ever notice how almost anything dodgy about the novel seems to go back there?). In its earliest days, the novel could look just any old way. It could be the journal of a shipwrecked man or a cascade of letters found in a trunk or a confession of a sinner, justified or not, or, indeed, a conventional linear narrative from alpha to omega. The point is, that was just one of several options. And then for the better part of a century, that was the option. Well, if you’d come right after that when suddenly the means of production shifted—no more monetary incentive—what would you do? Darned right. Except for those like Galsworthy and Bennett, for whom the conventional novel was a thing of economic beauty, the modernists weren’t having a lot to do with the linear novel.
The moderns do just about everything else you can do with or to a novel. I’ll not belabor poor old Joyce again, having made hay in that field many times over. But consider John Dos Passos, in both Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the novels that comprise the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), which are mosaics, assemblages of pieces aimed at portraying not some measly story of puny individuals but the big story of the whole thing (New York City in the former, the whole country in the latter), against which we puny individuals play out our measly lives. Dos Passos looks at the country—trains whizzing everywhere, teletypes clattering, speakeasies jumping, leftists agitating and governments cracking down on them—and says, now there’s a story worth telling. And it is. And he does. The technical problem, however, confronts him: how do you tell a tale this large about a people this fractious? Not the way Howells or Twain could have told it, that’s for sure. Maybe the way Picasso would tell it. It presents its subject—contemporary America—from a variety of perspectives, using techniques we don’t often associate with fiction. It has a main narrative line with characters, to be sure, but then it also has sections called “Camera Eye,” which are snapshots of moments and scenes from around the country, rapid-fire “Newsreels,” which attempt to mimic the new cinematic feature in words (employing both the headline style and the telegraphic texts of actual newsreels), and miniature biographies, mostly of admired cultural, often leftist, heroes and villains such as Randolph Bourne and Emma Goldman, Luther Burbank and Big Bill Haywood. To further confuse the issue, many of these pieces aren’t exactly in prose. Newsreels, obviously, have their own delivery, scarcely related to the norms of English prose narrative, while the styles he adopts for the biographies, though varied, are largely pointillist and impressionistic. Some, like those of Burbank and William Jennings Bryan, are written in long verse lines more suggestive of Carl Sandburg’s poetry or William Carlos Williams’s epic Paterson than any work of fiction. In fact, in the populist message, the uneasy combination of optimism and disillusionment, the mixing of genres, the wholesale borrowing of real-life materials, and the apparent formal freedom, U.S.A. probably resembles Paterson more than any other work of literature.
This tendency displays itself all over in modernist literature: in Faulkner and Woolf, to be sure, as well as in Dorothy Richardson’s twelve-novel leviathan, Pilgrimage, and in Joyce and Sherwood Anderson or Henry Green. Certainly, writers employing conventional linear narrative never went away. One can’t imagine E. M. Forster writing like Dos Passos or even his good friend Woolf, or D. H. Lawrence or Fitzgerald emulating Joyce or Faulkner. Then, too, the modernist era was also the age of the great mystery writers—Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Marjory Allingham, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald—none of whom could properly do their job without linear narrative. But in general, modernism takes a sharp turn away from the conventionality of the Victorian novel.
And things were just getting started. The phenomenon really picked up momentum sometime after 1950. The French New Novel, of course, did serious and intentional damage to all aspects of the traditional novel, with Alain Robbe-Grillet leading the way and the Italian Italo Calvino further exploding the form, although the Anglo-American postmodernists—from John Barth, Robert Coover, and John Fowles right down to Erdrich, the several O’Briens, Susan Minot, and Audrey Niffenegger.
This last writer’s novel, The Time-Traveler’s Wife, is particularly interesting in its rationale for a nonsequential narrative. As the title suggests, only one principal character, Henry DeTamble, time-travels, if unwillingly. His chronological dislocations hit him pretty much the way other people are struck by migraines. Clare Abshire, his eventual wife, lives in normal time, and the result is, predictably, difficult. The first time they meet, Henry is twenty-four and Clare five; somewhat later, he is thirty-six and she is twelve. In the normal course of things, such varying age ratios are impossible: I have always been two years older than my next brother and would be greatly disturbed if it were otherwise. The narrative jumps from date to date in a nonsequential order, producing in readers some of the dislocation and confusion to which Henry and Clare are subject, although Niffenegger provides both the dates and ages of each (particularly helpful when Henry’s age is wholly unpredictable) at the start of each new encounter. I have frankly never encountered such a strategy before, although I’m sure it exists somewhere. Nevertheless, it’s a dazzling exercise in joining discontinuous narrative to increasing-intensity plotting, where the stakes rise appreciably as we near the resolution. To tell such a story in straight chronological sequence would, it seems to me, violate the central concept of the novel, which is, roughly, you never can tell. It would also put a damper on the admittedly dizzying fun.
Why this acceleration of nonlinear narrative in the postwar years? It might have to do with the rise of creative-writing programs, in which the short story is the prized, because manageable and repeatable in the fourteen-week semester, form. It may be due to other environmental factors, such as the exhaustion of (or disgust with) linear narrative through overuse in film and television. Or it may be that writers, like the rest of us, enjoy playing with the new toy, that the exploded novel offers a range of narrative possibilities that have not already been mined out, that there are still new ways of telling stories and new stories, as Niffenegger shows us, to be told. And if there’s one thing that a literary form whose name means “new” should never become, it’s old hat.