This is the twenty-fourth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with John Gardner’s classic craft book The Art of Fiction, influential but perhaps in need of an update.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

On September 14, 1982, John Gardner died in a motorcycle crash. He was only 49. At the time, his third marriage was fast approaching—and his career was falling apart. Through his harsh criticisms of his contemporaries, such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Gardner had alienated himself from the literary community. Today, his most remembered novel is Grendel, his subversive retelling of Beowulf. Of his few books which have remained in print, it is somewhat ironic his craft book—in which he expressed his disdain for his fellow writers—has withstood the test of time. The Art of Fiction was published posthumously in 1984, and has since become a staple text for writers starting out.

Notwithstanding Gardner’s opening note expressing the apparent futility of teaching writing to an audience that may not have the “gift” (“What is said here, whatever use it may be to others, is said for the elite; that is, for serious literary artists” (Gardner x)), the haughty author did offer some useful craft observations. Gardner’s text is split into two parts. The first section is characterized by Gardner’s opinions on literary theory; the goals a writer for which a writer must strive. These most prominently include his emphasis on “fiction as dream”:

If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. (Gardner 30).

I agree that a lot of good fiction creates this “dream” in the mind, but in my experience, I would describe it more akin to seeing a movie in your head. When I write, I see a movie in my head that I am then trying to transcribe and translate into prose so that others can “watch” the movie I’m witnessing. That being said, for the purposes of this piece, I will focus mostly on craft techniques detailed in the second section of Gardner’s book, because that section focuses on mechanics. It explains how writers can craft this dream/movie with their prose—and the “common errors” of novice writers that disrupt the ‘dream-weaving’ process.

“In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist,” Gardner wrote. “We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing. It is as if a playwright were to run out on stage, interrupting his characters, to remind us that he has written all this” (Gardner 97). Gardner used this concept, that of a writer interrupting his own work, in his explanation of the problems of the ‘common errors’ of novice writers. But I think the idea also applies to metafictional techniques that, when sloppily executed, alert readers to the artifice of the work in general, an opinion Gardner expressed at a later moment in his book:

On one hand, showy technique is thrilling… On the other hand, cleverness can become its own end, subverting higher ends, as when style overshadows character, action, and idea. (Gardner 134-135)

I think about this problem a lot. Once I wrote a neo-noir story in the voice of Raymond Chandler. My writing instructor at the time recommended I read Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, a work of literary fiction that satirized Chandler’s voice and put it in the head of a detective with Tourette’s.

I ended up disliking Motherless Brooklyn because the text was constantly acknowledging that the whole thing was an extended joke—that Raymond Chandler’s iconic hardboiled voice was nothing more than something to mock, a ridiculous tone that only a narrator with a disability could possess. By constantly acknowledging its own artifice, Lethem’s novel seemed to shoot itself in the foot. But since the time of Motherless Brooklyn (1999) (later adapted as a much-maligned 2019 film)—the whole “meta” thing has gone mainstream, and now most popular movies, especially Marvel and Disney ones, constantly make jokes at dramatic moments. In an echo of Gardner’s sentiments, the effect was concisely summed up by YouTuber Sage Hyden:

“What moments like these signal to me is that the creators don’t have confidence in their own stories. They’re using the joke to distract from the film’s dramatic shortcomings.”

Because my fiction is often playing with genre tropes, whether they be pulp thriller, gothic horror house, or hardboiled detective, the key for me then becomes how to balance “subject and presentation,” as Gardner points out (135). To deal with genre clichés in a way that is smart, but not overly clever or drawing attention to itself—ways in which lesser Thor–type movies get away with, well, lackluster narratives.

The element of what Gardner calls psychic distance—the level of identification the narrator takes with a character—comprises an important way the “dream” can be effectively expressed, or alternately, disrupted. As Gardner expresses:

In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled. At the beginning of the story, in the usual case, we find the writer using either long or medium shots. He moves in a little for scenes of high intensity, draws back for transitions, moves in still closer for the story’s climax…. A piece of fiction containing sudden and inexplicable shifts in psychic distance looks amateur and tends to drive the reader away. (Gardner 112)

It is interesting that Gardner describes psychic distance’s levels in the language of film (“long or medium shots”). In so doing, he expresses the need to vary distance between what is told more abstractly to the reader and what is demonstrated in scene, and to also vary where the camera is positioned, whether the camera is from one character’s immediate perspective or zoomed out entirely.

What does Gardner have to say about suspense, then?

Ideally, every element in the lead-in passage should be a relevant distraction that heightens the reader’s anticipation and at the same time holds, itself, such interest…that the reader is reluctant to dash on.

I like how Gardner refers to supporting detail as a “relevant distraction,” and I think it might be useful to think of all ancillary details as “relevant distractions.” Relevant in that they set up or support the plot or character at hand, but also in that they fill in the gaps in the reader’s dream. Also key to Gardner’s analysis is that suspense is not just the motivating urge to keep reading, but suspense in the sense of suspended—the reader cannot go forward or backward without following the path of ropes and pulleys you’ve laid out for them. It is as much keeping the reader involved in the relevant distractions as getting them to turn the pages.

In a further elaboration of Gardner’s conception of suspense, I wanted to highlight what Gardner characterizes as the “Sartrian anguish of choice:”

That is, our suspenseful concern is not just with what will happen but with the moral implications of action. Given two possible choices, each based on some approvable goal, we worry, as we read, over which choice the character will make and, given the nature of reality, what the results will be.

To be involved in the suspense of the story or dream, a reader must worry about the consequences of what may happen to a character. The stakes of a character’s decision help crystallize the reader’s concern about the character’s fate. Another one of my writing mentors called this the “hope–dread” axis. A reader may hope a character makes the “right” decision, but he or she must also dread the consequences of the “wrong” one. In this way, a reader is involved on two emotional levels: fear and hope, both extremely powerful attachments crucial to supporting the dream.

When I write, I try to keep the hope–dread axis in mind when establishing stakes. What should I want the audience to hope? What should the audience know to fear? Often when a story isn’t working—the dream flawed and distracted—it is usually because one of these elements is not clear enough.

Gardner may have left the world unceremoniously and on bad terms, but aside from his potshots at other authors, much of his advice still holds. As long as novice writers such as myself struggle with psychic distance and suspense, The Art of Fiction and its advocacy of the “fiction as dream” will have its uses.

Works Cited

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. Vintage Books edition. New York: Vintage. 1991.

Hyden, Sage. “What Writers Can Learn from Wonder Woman.” JustWrite. YouTube. June 23, 2017.

Pfeiffer, Ben. “John Gardner’s Tricky Death and Tangled Legacy.” The Paris Review. September 14, 2017.

Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage. 1999.

Stanton, David. “Between the Lines.” The Washington Post. July 16, 2006.

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This is the twenty-third chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Andrea Barrett’s The Voyage of the Narwhal, winner of the 1998 National Book Award.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Andrea Barrett knows A LOT about polar exploration and the state of 19th century natural science. Her 1998 National Book Award-winning novel The Voyage of the Narwhal brims with references to Captain Franklin and The Terror, Antarctic explorer James Clark Ross, naturalist Asa Gray, etc. In Narwhal she crafts a revisionist narrative that both pays homage to the polar expeditions of the time and yet also challenges the less-modern aspects of those historical efforts and their contemporary scientific conventions—which often sidelined women and exploited indigenous peoples. The Voyage of the Narwhal succeeds in addressing these motives, and Barrett employs innovative narrative tactics to pull them off. However, I felt the novel suffered from the fact that the voyage of the Narwhal itself is not terribly interesting or realistic compared to more harrowing real-life tales (like that of Shackleton’s Endurance), and the novel’s latter half relies too heavily on a soap opera plot device that remains unresolved until the last second due to the overwhelming stubbornness of the novel’s would-be lovers. Narwhal, however, shows a path forward for writers who wish to craft oceangoing adventures for modern audiences.

First, let’s examine the expedition of the Narwhal. The novel’s initial protagonist is the delightfully-named Erasmus Wells, a former explorer who sees the Arctic expedition of his cocky brother-in-law-to-be, Zeke, as a way to finally become credentialed as a respected explorer after a less successful expedition to the South Pacific he had made in the past. In Philadelphia, Zeke and Erasmus leave behind Lavinia, Erasmus’ sister and Zeke’s partner, as well as Alexandra, a servant to the Wells family.

On the tiny Narwhal sailing ship, however, the story’s management of time strains some credulity. Erasmus supposedly has his first conversations with various members of the crew a few days into, or even weeks into the expedition—including the cook, Ned (described as on “day 4”) (page 46) and Erasmus’ scientific colleague, the physician Dr. Boerhaave (page 54), at least two weeks into the expedition (the timing is unclear). All these conversations, realistically speaking, would be happening on Day 1 or 2, or maybe before, during the crew interview process. I kind of laughed when I read every time that Erasmus was just meeting someone on the ship—halfway to the North Pole—for the first time. What has Erasmus been doing all day long for weeks, if not talking with the other half-dozen people on the boat? In Narwhal the technique is especially laughable because the ship is so small, and even class differences between the crew and the officers, as the novel points to as a reason for their segregation, are not reason enough to make sure that all the officers have not met each other.

During the early sections of the novel, Barrett weaves between different POVs by citing the diary entries of Ned the cook and Dr. Boerhaave to complicate the spacey, Erasmus-centric perspective, a tactic I admired, which also had the added effect that The Narwhal seemed like a real expedition and that authentic diaries had been compiled to write the book (as was the case in many famous books of polar exploration). Most innovative is Barrett’s decision to set up and keep tabs on the character of Alexandra through her diaries, one of the women left back home, because she becomes the driving force of the novel once Erasmus returns as a broken and depressed (and honestly total buzzkill of a) character. From Alexandra’s diary:

I lie in the dark and dream about that place and those people. I’d give anything to be with Zeke and Erasmus. Anything. I’m grateful for this position but sometimes I feel so confined—why can’t my life be larger? I imagine those Esquimaux befriended by Parry and his crew: the feasts and the games, the fur suits, the pairs of women tattooing each other; gravely passing a needle and a thread coated with lampblack and oil under the skin of their faces and breasts. I dream about them. I dream about the ice, the snow, the ice, the snow. (Barrett 86)

Back in Philly, Alexandra finds her own form of empowerment in secretly editing and typesetting a book written by a polar explorer, whereby she gradually expands her range of knowledge and expertise in publishing and science. Her smaller story, for much of its length, seems far more interesting than that of Erasmus, who spends most of the novel depressed and conflicted about betraying a dreadful personality in the form of Zeke. Rather, Alexandra expresses the strange and paradoxical urges which drive explorers to the poles, the Romanticism as laid out by Shelley’s polar explorer Walton in Frankenstein.

Eventually, due to some poor decision-making on the part of the vain and cowardly Zeke, the Narwhal gets frozen and trapped within the Arctic icepack, in homage to the contemporary lost ships The Terror and The Erebus and that of Shackleton’s later Endurance. By the time Erasmus abandons a missing Zeke in the Arctic and endorses the plan to abandon ship, the novel is only halfway over. As a result, an astute reader will expect Zeke’s return in a totally obvious Dickensian plot twist later in the book. So it is quite a subversion on the part of Barrett that a book titled The Voyage of the Narwhal extends far beyond that initial expedition and instead proceeds to investigate the legacy of that failed expedition and the climate of scientific racism in 19th century natural science.

Having spent some time studying the history of problematic 19th century earth scientists such as Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot (and have since then unexpectedly found myself in conversations with an ad-hoc inter-university task force to educate earth scientists about these figures’ less admirable qualities), I can say that Barrett nails this aspect dead-on.

She accomplishes this well in the episode when Zeke returns to Philadelphia, with his Inuit lover Annie and her (their?) son Tom, he goes on a lecture tour parading around the “Northern savages,” including a stop at the Smithsonian in Washington. In an effort to rescue the ill Annie and Tom from Zeke’s scientific abuse, Erasmus visits the Smithsonian and encounters a display of artifacts from Fiji peoples, gathered from a previous expedition in which he himself took part:

Case 71.

Collections made by the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the Feejee Islands… Cannibal Cooking Pots.

The Feejees are Cannibals. The flesh of women is preferred to that of men, and that part of the arm above the elbow and the thigh are regarded as the choicest parts. So highly do they esteem this food, that the greatest praise they can bestow on a delicacy is to say that it is as tender as a dead man…

[Erasmus] leapt back as if he’d been burned. He both and couldn’t remember those objects, and the young version of himself who’d helped gather them. Two members of the Expedition had been killed by those Feejee Islanders. He hadn’t taken part in the retaliatory raid, but he’d known what was happening. From the ship he’d seen the smoke from the burning villages and heard the rifle fire. Wilkes had argued that man-eating men deserved any punishment he might inflict, and although Erasmus had hated Wilkes’ harsh ways with the native peoples, in this case part of him agreed. But that had been before Dr. Rae returned from the arctic with the first news of Franklin’s fate, and those hints of mutilated corpses and human parts found in the British cooking kettles. Before Joe told him about the British boot. (Barrett 350-351)

This scene is an interesting way to address a character coming to terms with his complicity in imperialism. At its worst moments, it strikes me as very unrealistic for the time period for a character to be so enlightened, sort of like Tom Cruise’s cringey flashbacks of participating in what seems to be the Massacre at Wounded Knee in The Last Samurai or Gerard Depardieu’s laughably inaccurate portrayal of Columbus trying to protect the Taino Indians from his more rapacious Spanish colleagues in Ridley Scott’s misbegotten epic, 1492: Conquest of Paradise.

But here, Erasmus’ development is tied to his revelation, in the novel, that even the British explorers of the doomed Terror/Erebus expedition resorted to cannibalism, rendering the American judgement of the Fiji islanders overly harsh and hypocritical. To some level, Erasmus is also realizing that massacring natives is just as high a moral crime as consuming human flesh. To address Erasmus’ evolution, ironically I’ll quote Roger Ebert regarding that Columbus movie: “I am not convinced that Columbus was as enlightened as he seems in this movie, but perhaps historical figures exist in order to be reinterpreted every so often in terms of current needs” (Ebert). Erasmus is therefore a historical reimagining of a polar explorer character to reflect the more revisionist approach to history that Barrett is interested in pursuing, which makes the Narwhal more relevant to modern audiences.

Barrett develops that angle further, and most harrowingly, when she briefly peaks into Annie’s perspective as she is dying, when she realizes that her skeleton will be placed in the Smithsonian for future phrenologists to examine:

Annie was in a room….No one would listen to her. Not the doctor, not Zeke; not even Erasmus, who’d asked what she needed but then turned his back and disappeared when she’d said, I want to go home. Wasn’t that what she’d said? Her body would never go home now and she must do what she could for her son. A white cloth over the bed, white cases over the pillows; she had little time; she worked. The great power, the angekok [medicine man] had once told her, comes only after struggle and concentration. By the strength of her thought alone, she must strip her body of flesh and blood and be able to see herself as a skeleton. Each bone, each tiny bone, clear before her eyes. Then the sacred language would descend, allowing her to name the parts of her body that would endure. When she named the last bone she’d be free; her spirit could travel and she could watch over her son. She burrowed under the white cloth and squeezed shut her eyes, beginning the terrible process of shedding her flesh. Let me be bone, she thought. Like the long narwhal spines at home, the walrus skulls, the delicate ribs of the seals. White bone. (Barrett 363)

This is a striking section because it is one of the only moments which delves into Annie’s interiority and sympathizes with her plight more directly. It also alludes to a supernatural/ “Noble Savage” undertone regarding the Inuit characters that skews a bit too Dances with Wolves (ugh) for my taste. But this moment is critical, because it lays bare the horror of what the explorers have done to this Inuit woman. They have brought her out of her context, into a climate to which she was ill-prepared, and now she will die at the hands of Western doctors (who are still really bad at medicine at this point in history), and finally her bones will be treated as a prop in a museum.

Despite this profundity, the Narwhal gets a bit exasperating as the final section relies on a “will-they/won’t-they” romance between Alexandra and Erasmus. By this point in the novel they are living in a cabin in the woods together, so for their first sexual encounter to be ten pages from the ending, feels a bit intentionally delayed:

On April 26, late at night, Alexandra walked into his room. Twenty-two buttons down the front of her gray dress; she unfastened the first six, as simply as if she were shedding her dress for her painter’s smock. Erasmus undid the rest. The first sight of her bare shoulders struck him like his first sight of ice—how could he have forgotten that? (Barrett 386)

In this scene I find it kind of amusing (and also interesting) that Barrett makes the Freudian leap that an explorer’s attraction to the ice is the same desire he feels for a woman. Whereas other texts might retain this idea as a subtext, Barrett makes this idea (the phallic act of “exploration”) explicit. However, Erasmus and Alexandra’s new union allows Alexandra to join Erasmus as his explorer-wife as they try to return Tom to his homeland at the wish of Annie, who may (or not) be literally haunting them as an Inuit ghost. It does seem like a fraught plan regardless, as there’s no guarantee Tom will be welcomed back to a community he left as a child. But it is a Romantic ending, wherein the explorer goes off into the misty ice and disappears, just like what happens to Dr. Frankenstein and his monster at the end of their book.

Overall, Narwhal succeeds as a revisionist adventure novel that takes aim at the problematic ideologies which promoted these historical explorations in the first place. It’s a soap opera, but then again, Dickens succeeded by drawing from the drama of glacial love stories and unexpected reappearances, and it’s a strategy that still works today.

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Works Cited

Barrett, Andrea. The Voyage of the Narwhal (W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1998).

Ebert, Roger. “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” RogerEbert.com, October 9, 1992, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/1492-conquest-of-paradise-1992

Zwick, Edward (director). The Last Samurai (Warner Bros., 2003).

This is the twenty-second chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the classic Russian novel about a lot of things—but mostly about what happens when the devil visits Moscow and wreaks havoc upon the corrupt Soviet elite. (There are spoilers in here of one of the book’s subplots, which is based on one of the most famous stories of all time, but I guess this merits a warning.)

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a complicated novel that eludes simple explanation. On one level, it concerns the shenanigans of the devil and his coterie when they arrive in Stalin’s Moscow. On another, it is a love story between a sad-sack novelist only known as the master with a lively married woman named Margarita. It also happens to feature a novel-within-a-novel starring Pontius Pilate, the reluctant executor of Jesus. Needless to say, this novel has a lot going on.

In this post, I will focus on just a few of Bulgakov’s craft elements. These include his incorporation of the Pilate novel as a paratext; his complex characterization of the all-powerful devil, Woland; and Bulgakov’s careful–crafted ambiguities that make his novel a puzzle that cannot be solved. For anyone who is trying to craft ambiguities that keep readers engaged with the story long after they have finished reading, The Master and Margarita is a fascinating example for how to achieve such an effect.

Pontius Pilate

The Master and Margarita opens with an unlikely scene—a seemingly Socratic dialogue between some Moscow intellectuals and a foreign professor named Woland—who is actually Satan. After the intellectuals demand proof of Jesus’ historic existence, Woland insists there is no need for proof (14). He elaborates:

‘It’s all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan…’ (14).

Immediately, we are thrust into the next chapter, which opens with the same line:

In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate (15).

Suddenly, the prose style has changed from a zigzagging, satirical narrative voice (“the poet, for whom the editor was telling him was new… merely hiccupped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under his breath” (5)) to a formal narrator. In such fashion, we receive a more controlled voice, as exemplified by some lush imagery of Roman Judea—“a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses and palms in the garden” (15). In this case, the Pilate narrative is triggered by the exact lines Woland utters. Later, we learn that the Pilate narrative is in fact the master’s novel (135), but its chapters are triggered in different ways and as experienced by different characters: as a hallucination by Ivan Nikolaevich (168), as a manuscript read by Margarita (298), and presumably, as a diabolically-correct direct quotation of that manuscript by the devil (14). Complicating the Master’s novel is that the devil asserts that he was present at the events of Jesus’ sentencing and execution (we’ll come back to this) (40). The formal narrative voice, however, is consistent within the Pilate sections, making it immediately distinguishable from the rest of the novel. Instead of regularly alternating the Pilate novel with the main story, the sections are infrequent, coming in the second chapter, the sixteenth, and the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters, respectively. Each section is triggered by a character reading or saying a line that makes up the first line of a Pilate section.

But enough on that. Let’s talk about “villains who have a point.”

Villains who have a point

There is some clichéd adage that a protagonist can only be as strong as the villain he or she faces. In The Master and Margarita, the devil Woland is as all-powerful as one can get. But because he is also a sympathetic adversary to the master, while being ‘less’ sympathetic to everyone in Moscow—his role is complicated, making him a stronger character. When he finally offers the master a chance at purgatory, as heaven is off-limits (according to the ‘angel’ Matthew Levi), our expectations of his nefarious intentions are thwarted (381). As readers, we have been dreading what Woland might do to the master since the devil restored the burned manuscript and said “‘Well, it’s all clear now’… tapping the manuscript with a long finger”—an action that might indicate Woland’s interest in destroying the master (287). And yet, in time, we learn Woland has something better in mind—the chance to forgive the subject of his novel, Pontius Pilate:

‘Your novel has been read,’ Woland began, turning to the master, ‘and the only thing said about it was that, unfortunately, it is not finished. So, then, I wanted to show you your hero’ (381).

In most Christian texts, God or Jesus have the power to forgive. And yet, in Bulgakov’s novel, Jesus, through the guise of Matthew Levi, refuses to admit the master to heaven (287). Only the devil can give the master peace, and offer him the chance to give Pilate his own form of freedom. Perhaps this was a way for Bulgakov to show how, in a topsy-turvy Stalinist world, only Satan will do what Jesus refuses—to act, to take matters into his own hands, to grant reprieves to those who have struggled their whole lives—the master—or, in the case of Pilate—eternity.

For a villain to be compelling, he has to be partly correct, his worldview exposing the weaknesses in the protagonist’s vision—causing the protagonist to grow or collapse. In the case of Woland, he offers the master a sanctuary from the ruin in which he has so long toiled:

‘What are you going to do in the little basement?... The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn’ (383).

Woland gives the master the freedom to pass on, something Jesus won’t even allow.

But enough of the devil. We need to talk about Aphranius.

Aphranius

“You try to hold the novel’s face, and it turns away once again,” Boris Fishman wrote in the forward to the novel’s 50th anniversary edition (x). The Master and Margarita possesses a great deal of ambiguity. Much like the best David Lynch films, while some elements are spelled out, others seem to shift, disguise themselves deeper in their mysteries.

In the third chapter, Woland asserts that he was present during Jesus’ trial:

‘The thing is…’ here the professor looked around fearfully and spoke in a whisper, ‘that I was personally present at it all. I was on Pontius Pilate’s balcony, and in the garden when he talked with Kaifa, and on the platform, only secretly, incognito, so to speak, and therefore I beg you—not a word to anyone, total secrecy, shh…’ (40).

In the first Pilate chapter, there are two moments in which the devil might have appeared. The first is when a swallow flies into the room during Jesus’ trial, the bird’s arrival coinciding with a surge in Pilate’s headache and the procurator’s decision to execute Jesus (24).

The second instance is a very brief mention of Pilate meeting “a certain man, whose face was half covered by a hood, though he could not have been bothered by the sun’s rays in this room” (34). Was the devil the bird, or the hooded man? Or both? By the second Pilate section, we meet the “same hooded man with whom Pilate had a momentary meeting in a darkened room of the palace” (170).

In the third Pilate section, the hooded figure returns and has an extended audience with Pilate, and we learn he is the head of Pilate’s secret police (301-309). We are given the detail “it would be difficult to establish this man’s nationality”— which seems to signal that this is Woland, since when we first meet the devil, he is described as a foreign professor of ambiguous nationality (303, 6-14).

But the novel averts such a firm distinction—rather, it further complicates it. Pilate asks the man to “protect” Judas, and the man—finally named “Aphranius”—accepts the assignment (308-309). In the next Pilate section, Aphranius meets Niza, a woman who proceeds to lead Judas to his assassination (312-317).

After Judas’ killing, a figure with a hood, presumably Aphranius, appears and examines Judas’ body (317). We are led to believe this assassination has been part of Aphranius’ secret plan all along, but then Bulgakov throws us for yet another loop. After Aphranius apologizes to Pilate for failing to save Judas’ life, Pilate is nonchalant (“The procurator grinned and said: ‘Not much’” in reaction to Judas’ meager reward of silver) (321). Pilate proceeds to interrogate Matthew Levi, and admits it was he who actually ordered Judas’ assassination (327-330). “‘It is not much to have done, but all the same I did it,’” Pilate tells Matthew (330).

Was Pilate speaking in code to Aphranius? That by protecting Judas, he wanted Aphranius to kill him? Then why speak in circles, as Aphranius apologizes for not ‘saving’ Judas? Or is Pilate taking credit for something he did not do? An even wilder reading might be that Aphranius orchestrated Judas’ killing in the same way Woland orders the ‘death’ of the master and Margarita, poisoning them so they can enter a form of eternal life (370-371). Either way, the murkiness of Aphranius’ true identity—the conflicting nature of both Pilate and Aphranius’ attitude toward Judas’ assassination—allow for no simple answers. The deeper we look, the more the novel ‘turns away.’

In my own work, I write for ambiguities that force the reader to try to solve a puzzle that may or may not be solvable, but that ambiguity must not undermine the efficacy of the work as a whole. A movie like Mulholland Drive creates paradoxes, but most of these paradoxes can be resolved by its end. The Master and Margarita answers some questions, but leaves others unresolved. Mastering effective ambiguity, it seems, will take a great deal of time in a Moscow basement.

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Works Cited

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. 50th anniversary edition. New York: Penguin. 2016.

This is the twenty-first chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with H.P. Lovecraft’s classic At the Mountains of Madness, the sci-fi horror novella that set the template for films like The Thing (1982), Alien (1979), and Prometheus (2012).

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

At the Mountains of Madness (to which I will henceforth humorously abbreviate as “ATMOM”) is not the first horror story set in Antarctica, but it is one of the most influential (Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, referenced in Lovecraft’s novella, precedes it (8)).

But without ATMOM, we probably would not have The Thing or the Alien film franchises. As such, to borrow the nickname of the Rose Bowl, ATMOM is the “granddaddy of them all.” ATMOM is worth considering for its influence, its unusual choices in narrative style and exposition, but we’ll also have to contend with the elements that have not aged particularly well.

ATMOM is written in the style of a polar journal in the voice of an explorer named Dyer, a decision that both lends authenticity to the narrative but also saps it of its tension, since the existence of the journal might suggest that its author survived the events of the story.1 A popular genre in the early 20th century, polar exploration journals were frequently published and despite their frequent tedium, sometimes became bestsellers—in a way, they were the Planet Earth episodes of their day.

In the novella, Lovecraft acknowledges his debt to the polar genre when he references “regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott and Byrd.” This move places the “Miskatonic University Expedition” in the continuum of their polar forebears and also showcases an early example of the “false document” narrative strategy—when a book asserts that its contents are a true report of a “real-life” event. This technique was used to great effect by Michael Crichton in The Andromeda Strain, in which he presented his extraterrestrial disease thriller as a “true story” through declassified government reports.

Meanwhile, the early chapters of ATMOM feature dense descriptions of geology, Precambrian fossils, and measurements of latitude and longitude, adding further to the verisimilitude of the early chapters but not exactly contributing to their suspense. Like how these elements are often discussed in polar journals, these components are just as boring here.

The basic plot structure of ATMOM is probably the most influential aspect to the science fiction genre. An advanced party explores a new region and then their transmissions cease. The second party arrives and discovers the abandoned camp, discerning the clues of what might have happened to the lost explorers. This basic format has served as the premise for the films The Thing (1982) and Aliens (1986), in particular. Here, Dyer’s party discovers a lost city in Antarctica built by the Elder Things, a primordial alien race, later killed off by a second, mysterious alien presence (the “shoggoth” monsters originally created and enslaved by the Elder Ones). That said, The Thing and Aliens are much more enjoyable than ATMOM. The dry polar journal format really saps the tension out of the story, which is far more focused on world-building than plot development or the exploration of its characters.

There are also aspects of Lovecraft’s novella that represent dubious elements of storytelling. For one, the narrator’s lengthy explanation of millions of years of history relies on his decipherment, without any difficulty, of the ancient city’s cave drawings:

In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged scale—these things giving a naïve and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. (67)

Nowadays, a writer might be asked to create a telepathic connection with the drawings or something to justify the protagonist’s instant understanding of the art. However, in the book, Lovecraft establishes that Dyer and his colleagues are familiar with the “Necronomicon,” an in-universe book of legends establishing the Cthulhu mythos within Lovecraft’s works (7-8). So perhaps that can account for their instant comprehension of the sculptures and cartouches.

The second element which appears to have aged poorly is the “look” of the shoggoth monsters, their form finally revealed in the book’s climax:

It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder. (117)

Despite Lovecraft’s vivid imagination, he relies on self-aware, cop-out abstractions such as “the fantastic novelist’s ‘thing that should not be.’” What is striking about his monster is that he can only compare it to a subway train, which is strange, considering that this book was written in the 1930s, and subway trains had been around since the 1860s. This I found laughable—that Lovecraft thought subways were unspeakably scary!

Then, of course, we have to contend with the most uncomfortable element in the story. Part of the central mystery of the novel is the fate of the Elder Ones. Eventually, our narrator determines that the enslaved shoggoth monsters had rebelled against their masters and killed the Elder Ones. Plenty of postcolonial scholars have already suggested that this formed an allegory to the idea of contemporaneously colonized countries rising up against their imperial overlords.

While dated and problematic, the plot element speaks to an anxiety likely felt by Lovecraft, known for his white supremacist views and incoherent political ideologies. Interestingly, the element of an ancient alien race killed off by its creations was repurposed for the Alien prequel Prometheus (2012). Just like the Elder Ones were killed off by the “shoggoths,” the ancient alien-astronaut Engineers in Prometheus suffered at the hands of the xenomorphs.

At the Mountains of Madness may be a problematic text, but its legacy on speculative fiction is massive. It is unlikely that the current genre of sci-fi horror would look the way it does today without Lovecraft’s vision.

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Works Cited

“At the Mountains of Madness,” Wikipedia, January 13, 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness

Lovecraft, H. P. At the Mountains of Madness (Penguin English Library: London, 2018).

This is the twentieth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Kirsten Bakis’ novel Lives of the Monster Dogs, a modern classic that combines elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and throws them into the blender—before tossing the concoction into the Instant Pot.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

This is a book that should not work. There’s a reason Lives of Monster Dogs (LoMD) has been pretty much forgotten since its publication in 1997—it’s off-puttingly WEIRD. As Jeff VanderMeer notes in my edition’s introduction, this novel reimagines H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a freakish saga of what happens after the events of the Island of Dr. Moreau, after animals with genetically enhanced intelligence escape the laboratory and try to integrate within human society. The twist is that Bakis’ “monster dogs,” equipped with handy steampunk voiceboxes and mechanical humanoid hands, move to New York and build a castle in Manhattan. Having been raised in the remote polar community of Rankstadt—which possessed a 19th century Prussian culture—the dogs dress in a Victorian fashion and speak in arch, antiquated sentences. There’s a ticking clock, too, as the dogs are progressively losing their intelligence, foreshadowing future catastrophe. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot to talk about in regards to this novel—probably too much.

Today I’ll focus on the novel’s most flashy rhetorical flourish—the in-text opera Mops Hacker, which reveals the backstory of the monster dogs at a critical moment—or, actually, it reveals the backstory of the monster dogs as interpreted by the monster dogs, packaged as a propaganda entertainment.

There’s a note at the beginning of the embedded paratext Mops Hacker: The Opera which tells you all you need to know about the tone of LoMD: “Place: Rankstadt, an isolated town in the Canadian wilderness… Time: September 1999, but the culture resembles that of Prussia about 1882” (190).

Bakis expects a great deal of readers in this book. Not only does she hope we’ll go along with the idea of a 19th century Prussian mad scientist—a somewhat familiar archetype—who manipulates the genetic structures of dogs, but that we should accept that this scientist does this for the purpose of creating “perfect soldiers” in the mold of a campy proto-Nazi. Then we are supposed to swallow that this mad scientist successfully relocates his laboratory to the remote Canadian Arctic, where his followers continue on with his project for the next hundred years, retaining the same cultural mores despite the passage of time. Here, Bakis is playing on so many levels that she expects us to approach this “remix” of Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau not just on the level of camp (though there is that, of course), but also as a serious novel more generally. As Vandermeer explains in his introduction:

…hybrids tend to be misunderstood and often have trouble finding an audience or sympathetic reviewers. Because hybrids are composed of both new thought and old parts, they seem to exist, on an elemental level, in uneasy contrast…. And yet over time this seeming lack of harmony gathers its own kind of symphonic powers.

In that sense, I think it is a miracle that LoMD was ever published and received so well.

One of the most successful elements of Monster Dogs is the aforementioned opera script, which comes at a climactic point in the story. The paratext is particularly interesting because not only does it offer exposition—the secret to the final mystery of the dogs’ revolution—but it also offers a mediated message. The opera is propaganda for the dogs, a literary interpretation of historical events that no one but the dogs themselves can verify. So while it offers an answer, it doesn’t point to a definitive one, and there is certainly some ambiguity in the telling.

One of the most fascinating ways Bakis uses the opera script is how it both celebrates and condemns its protagonist, Mops Hacker, as a revolutionary savior driven by madness, a psychopathic outcast who is also something of an “incel” (unrequitedly pining for the pivotal female dog character Lydia). In the opera, at least, Mops is demonstrably monstrous in character before he attacks, even compared with his compatriot monster dogs:

MOPS (Stirring but not waking). Cursed master, this morning I won’t answer you./But if only once I would answer you properly, with a sword!/Oh, what joy!/What joy to split his ugly head/And leave him lying there for dead,/To burn his house and all that’s in it,/To stand up finally to fight, and win it!/Oh, how I long to kill him (194).

To name an antihero as murderous within the text of the play is a choice, either reflective of how the dog-authors want to distance themselves from their genocidal liberator, or reflective of the “true Mops.” Either way, it is not the heroic protagonist we might expect in a traditional opera or play, as usually in this sort of tragedy, we might expect someone with potentially good qualities to eventually turn evil, rather than remain statically bloodthirsty the entire story.

Despite this deviation from convention, aspects of the opera seem to align with Shakespearean tropes. Just as Mops is about to kill himself, he sees the ghost of Augustus Rank, his creator (in the same way that Hamlet ambiguously “sees” the ghost of his father):

A golden cloud of smoke appears. In the center of it is AUGUSTUS RANK.

RANK. My son, stop.

MOPS falls to the ground in amazement.

MOPS. Augustus Rank! You have returned.

RANK. You call me master,/You alone among the dogs/Reject the feeble man who owns you/And long to serve me. (Bakis 196)

Notably, the opera is consistent with the previously-seen excerpts of Rank’s journals, which allude to Rank’s gold-tinged visions, such as after Rank murdered his romantic rival Vittorio:

Third, I saw a flash of light so brilliant that it blinded me for a moment, the same moment that the blood began to spurt out of Vittorio’s neck. I then saw that the luminescence was of a golden color, but brighter than anything I had ever seen, and it was only thanks to my newfound strength that it did not sear and permanently damage my eyes. For my body is stronger, too, since my enlightenment. (95)

Bakis’ interlocking narratives achieve some impressive synergies. Throughout the novel, the dogs are suggested to have inherited Rank’s soul, and that their pathologies might also be a result of Rank’s psychoses, which have passed along to his “descendants.” So when the dog opera references elements previously featured in “historical sources” also excerpted in the novel, it adds layers of complexity and verisimilitude that continue to build out this universe.

Adding additional complexity to the opera is the very Greek tragedy-type of dialogue between Lydia and Mops in the final sequence (which, naturally might also remind the reader of Star Wars):

MOPS. Lydia, snow-white Lydia, how beautiful you are!/For years I’ve desired you./Lydia, how I long to make you mine./The time has come./We’ve won./Together we can rule, we two, as one,/The victorious, free Nation of Dogs.

LYDIA. Never, Mops. (Bakis 214)

It seems very Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker for Mops to ask Lydia to join him and rule over the dogs—which goes without saying this exchange is unbelievably campy! It is an opera, however, a genre not given to subtlety. Bakis’ text-within-a-text can be ridiculous without notice because the premise of the entire novel is so absurd that this seems familiar enough to keep us going. In typical overwrought opera fashion, Lydia stabs Mops and ends the revolution, but only after all the humans in Rankstadt are killed.

And finally, one last point on the Monster Dogs. After the opera concludes, the book’s primary human narrator, Cleo, asks Lydia if the opera was factually accurate:

“And was that how it happened?” I asked Lydia, one evening after the opera… “Yes, more or less,” Lydia said. (219)

So while Bakis has sowed doubts about the opera’s accuracy, she also wants us to rely on the opera as the definitive origin story for the dogs in the book. Or, at least—that Lydia wants Cleo to think of her as the hero who killed Mops and limited the damage of the dog revolution.

Bakis’ paratexts are so complex, they are tour-de-forces when it comes to the very idea of paratexts.

However, it still seems curious as to why, then, did Bakis go to the trouble of writing an opera for the monster dogs? To my mind, the narrative decision represents the sheer experimentation of the book and Bakis’ commitment to making her book as hybrid a text as possible. I think this contributes to both the cult success and popular failure of LoMD.

As Vandermeer suggested, though the hybridization of genres makes LoMD exciting, the remixing can also turn people off, and makes LoMD lose its own identity as a footnote to the more famous works which have inspired it.

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Works Cited

Bakis, Kirsten. Lives of the Monster Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1997).

This is the nineteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber’s craft book about considering how to shape narrative time in fiction.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

In practice, Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction, part of Graywolf Press’ The Art Of craft series edited by Charles Baxter, reads more like a literature survey of different examples of narrative time than a craft book (which is fine). Silber organizes her survey into categories of narrative time: “classic time,” “long time,” “switchback time,” “slowed time,” “fabulous time,” and “time as subject,” producing various examples of short stories or novels that invoke these modes of narrative delivery.

In this post, I will briefly discuss Silber’s definitions of “classic time” and “switchback time.” What forms the basis of the time frame most writers rely upon is what Silber calls “classic time”:

A favorite assumption—in writing workshops, in books on writing, and in the ordinary conversations of lay readers—is that a story or a novel will rely chiefly on scene, carefully interspersed with a little necessary summary. (Silber 11)

Her chief example of this narrative-timeline style is The Great Gatsby, a short novel crammed with event and plot and yet sticks with scene-writing familiar to cinema and theater. Despite Gatsby’s brevity, the novel has a lot of scenes which each drive to a particular dramatic moment. To demonstrate this characteristic of Gatsby, Silber highlights the scene when Nick invites Daisy over to tea as a pretext for Gatsby and Daisy to reconnect. This scene involves Gatsby leaving Nick’s house as Daisy arrives, then with Gatsby returning to the doorway of the house to make a nervous, dramatic entrance, even as he is soaked in the rain. Nick then goes outside himself while he lets the former flames process each other’s presence in his foyer.

As Silber explains, “The choreography could not be more like a comic farce, with characters exiting and entering through the rooms of the set” (Silber 16). In Silber’s telling, we are given this scene in all its tedious movements because the scene is dramatic—two lovers, long lost from each other, suddenly in the same room—and Fitzgerald knows how to milk the moment to comic effect, one in which each zoomed-in exchange builds to a catharsis—Gatsby and Daisy reunited again. The stage-iness of the scene apparently owes its lineage to the long tradition of theatrical storytelling, but that’s not to say that such storytelling is the only way to depict time. It’s just the way that most people think storytelling should be presented. Silber tries to explain the appeal of this narrative method:

What does it say about readers’ expectations if the maneuvers of time in Gatsby can feel “classic”? It would seem that we expect stories to come in close for the key points and get to the next spots with all due haste. We’re impatient modern readers and we want the immediacy of scene. Movies have helped build this hunger in us, but not only movies. As readers, as audience, we want to directly hear what people are saying, we want to see their faces while they’re saying it…. And we want a sense of destination…. The stream of events [in Gatsby] is always rising to reach a point (Silber 19-20).

Though Silber expresses some reluctance to state this more emphatically, movies have certainly reinforced the tendency toward classic time. Many Victorian novels engaged with long summaries or omniscient narrators, but most popular literary 20th century novels were scene-focused—why else would readers want to hear dialogue and see their faces while they are saying it? Moreover, the key aspect of Silber’s analysis, that scenes rise to a point, is a dramatic component older than Aristotle’s Poetics. If a scene does not rise to a point, then it’s not really a satisfying scene. I’m not sure what Silber is getting at in terms of time, because hopefully most storytelling, regardless of time structure, reaches some sort of point (or realization) by the end (or beginning), or wherever a postmodern structure determines that point should be (for example, Infinite Jest’s climactic ending is presented at the beginning, but it still has an ending, technically).

However, what Gatsby excels at that, that my own work doesn’t always do well, is Fitzgerald’s ability at fast-forwarding through time to get to the next big scene by using strategic amounts of summary. To summarize the series of parties held at Gatsby’s estate, Silber notes how Fitzgerald name-drops various people who give a sense of habitual time in the list:

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person, but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before… (Fitzgerald, qtd. in Silber 18-19).

Fitzgerald’s description of Benny and his rotating cast of four girls helps get across the number of parties attended without ever having to describe each and every one. By being specific and general at the same time, we as readers are alerted to the magnitude and habitual nature of Gatsby’s parties.

Another trope that my work often over-relies on is that of what Silber calls “switchback time,” which is Silber’s elaboration on the more-cinematic techniques of flashback and backstory: “I’m using it to mean a zigzag movement back and forth among time frames, the method of a fiction that alternates between different ‘eras’… then and now and further back are all partners with an investment in the outcome” (Silber 45). Silber resists the idea of backstory as a footnote submissive to a main timeline, rather she believes more effective fiction toggles between different timelines to achieve a better unity of the whole.

As you might expect, I’m not entirely convinced of this argument. A narrative has to be propulsive in the A-plot for the secondary plots to matter; I don’t think it’s advisable to have equally-weighted plots in a narrative; eventually one has to rise to the fore and be more compelling than the others. For example, most of John Le Carré’s novels were class acts, and yet most of his later (and less powerful books) (Our Kind of Traitor, The Russia House, etc.) almost comically depend on flashbacks-upon-flashbacks to fit the backstory into a present timeline, the point of telling inevitably becoming the most important timeline.

In addition, the mode of narration that Silber seems to be describing sounds like the book equivalent of Nocturnal Animals, a film which follows the life of a character played by Amy Adams in the present, interspersed with some flashbacks about her relationship with a character played by Jake Gyllenhaal in the past, alongside Amy Adams’ interpretation of the Jake Gyllenhaal character’s novel—in which she casts Gyllenhaal as the novel’s protagonist. The movie is successful, but the present Amy Adams timeline is still forefronted as the most important one.

You do have to make one timeline the most important, and so 99 percent of the time even seemingly equally-weighted plot threads end up being recursive ‘flashbacks,’ eventually. That rule might be excepted by Silber’s example of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”

As a chief example of ‘switchback’ time, Silber references “Sonny’s Blues,” about a narrator who is reflecting on his brother’s arrest on a heroin charge (the titular Sonny), which famously begins “I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work” (Baldwin, qtd. in Silber 54).

Baldwin’s narrator is able to recall three memories related to Sonny’s life which gives Sonny’s life more depth—the story of their father’s dead brother, as told by their mother, the narrator arguing with Sonny about pianos, and the death of the narrator’s daughter to polio. The triptych-flashback style of this narration can show how the narrator is trying to know Sonny more intimately, but all these reflections still feed into the narrator’s present moment, and yet that present moment is merely a frame story that does not necessarily have the same dramatic intensity as the flashbacks. As Silber states: “Baldwin, with the skill to handle any viewpoint… surely would have had no trouble making Sonny the teller… But Baldwin was after something else: the depth of understanding that only a resonance of time frames could bring about” (Silber 56).

That depth of understanding is facilitated by Sonny’s reflection. “Sonny’s Blues” is a story about a man thinking about a man’s life, which is a complex way to approach timelines, and yet in each snippet he does evoke a scene.

In Silber’s telling, then, scene and backstory thus seem fundamental building blocks to narrative strategy, the challenge resides in where to put each component and having the dramatic rationale and acumen to pull it off.

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Works Cited

Ford, Tom (Director). Nocturnal Animals (Focus Features, 2016).

Silber, Joan. The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as it Takes (Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2009).

This is the eighteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson’s epic, time-spanning thriller revolving around the search for Axis gold in the Philippines.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

In a telling interview in Locus, Neal Stephenson described that he came up with the title for Cryptonomicon from “[hearing] the word Necronomicon bounced around.” He added that he “actually [hadn’t] read the Lovecraft books, but clearly it’s formed by analogy to that.” Oddly enough, this reminds me of a line from Zoolander, when Owen Wilson’s Hansel praises Sting in an awards show, and then says, “One of my heroes I guess would be Sting. I mean, I don’t listen to any of his music, but I really respect that he’s making it.” As a result, Stephenson comes across as a writer unfamiliar of his own speculative context.

Stephenson is a writer of dense technical detail and clearly has an ambitious narrative streak in him. However, reading Cryptonomicon is like reading a brick wall, a book of 918 pages of small print in which perhaps five interesting things happen. Maybe this book would work better for me if it was, say, 400 pages, but it’s not. Sci-fi writer Charles Yu once said (in praise!?):

It’s so long, and so dense. It’s almost 1000 pages long, and those are big pages. It must be half a million words long… So much information. It’s a fact: a copy of Cryptonomicon has more information per unit volume than any other object in this universe. Any place that a copy of the book exists is, at that moment, the most information-rich region of space-time in the universe. If you drop a carton of Cryptonomicon paperbacks into a black hole of any size, the black hole doubles in size. (quoted in Anders)

While Cryptonomicon is dense, it’s dense with filler (an entire chapter is devoted to a character eating Cap’n Crunch) (Stephenson 475-485). Whereas each piece of a more sophisticated long work like Infinite Jest feels intentional, it’s unclear to me why Cryptonomicon needs to be of this length. The novel tracks four characters across two timelines: WWII codebreaker Lawrence Waterhouse, WWII US Marine Bobby Shaftoe, modern systems expert Randy Waterhouse (Lawrence’s grandson) and Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier who later helps out Randy in the 1980s. The plot builds (glacially) to the planned excavation of a lost Axis gold deposit in the Philippines. And while the WWII plot is mildly diverting most of the time, the 1980s plotline irked me like sandpaper against chalkboard. Perhaps innovative in when released in the 1990s, the plot, which involves building a crypto-financial-data haven in a South Pacific sultanate, feels dated in the 2020s. Stephenson’s male gazey writing of female characters also feels irrevocably tied to the 1990s, when being a hacker and casual objectification women must have been “cool” to some geek circles (for example, “his hands [made] a sling under her warm and flawless ass” (Stephenson 48)).

I want to point out what I found most aggravating about Stephenson’s style: his repetitive and filler-soaked structure. Chapter after chapter, I found that Stephenson had little variation between chapter structure. Typically, Stephenson opens with a tedious situation that takes up maybe 18 pages and is mostly filler, followed by a single final paragraph or exchange that features a plot point to end the chapter. It’s very formulaic and transparent. Take the chapter on cereal, for example.

“Crunch” is a chapter in the middle of the novel about Randy Waterhouse. Informed he will be taking a dance class in Manila with Amy Shaftoe, his love interest and a descendant of Bobby Shaftoe, he watches a dance instruction video while eating cereal. The cereal eating, however, is the primary focus of Randy’s perspective (and therefore, ours):

The gold nuggets of Cap’n Crunch pelt the bottom of the bowl with a sound like glass rods being snapped in half. Tiny fragments spall away from their corners and ricochet around on the white porcelain surface. World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds. (Stephenson 477)

This isn’t even the first speech in this chapter on how Randy eats cereal! This is the second of three. If there is a point to this speech, it’s to show how analytical and engineer-y Randy is, and how much he doesn’t really want to think about dancing. But we already know that. This is page 477. We have seen Randy enough to know these things about him. What is the point?

Randy then reads a few emails, which we get in full (probably a cool thing when emails were a novel technology?), and then he has a flashback about learning how to dance with his Grandma, and then dances with Amy (Stephenson 477-485). After all these tedious sequences, finally Amy reveals she has latitude and longitudes for a location important to tracking down the Axis treasure (Stephenson 485).

Stephenson spends so much time and energy on information that is not important that it’s hard to care when he finally gives us information that is. Chapter after chapter is a slog to get to the one paragraph or detail which illuminates the way forward. I’m convinced this book could have been a tightly-paced narrative if the book’s editor eliminated every other paragraph (and the reader probably wouldn’t notice any paragraphs were missing).

There is one particular scene in which I thought Stephenson told a good story, which baffled me because I thought the rest of the book could have used a lesson from this moment. This sequence involves Randy read a computer document about a guy who is having troubles in bed with his wife (Stephenson 358-364). The story builds very slowly and efficiently. The narrator of this document, a colleague of Randy’s, explains he is aroused by women in stockings, rooted in some moment in his adolescence. One day he sees his wife wear stockings, and he is completely taken with her and they go to a hotel room; he admits they have “the best sex [he’d] ever had” (Stephenson 360). After he owns up to his kink, his wife agrees to start wearing stockings to spice up their sex life. Then one day they have intense sex in her late grandmother’s bedroom in the presence of antique furniture, and now the wife has a very powerful experience. Then, several years later, the narrator ordered a custom-built heirloom bed for them, which gives his wife a similarly powerful experience. The story concludes with the punchline:

This was the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to—preferably on top of—a piece of heirloom-grade furniture that she owned. (Stephenson 365)

While edgy and a bit questionable, this story has all the elements of a dramatic narrative—with all the set-up needed for the punchline and the economy for the joke to land—that seem elsewhere in the novel drastically absent or buried under the weight of the novel’s density. It almost makes me feel that Stephenson wrote this story for something else and dropped it in here (since this story has barely anything to do with any relevant plot), or that maybe once in a while, throwing enough darts at the board will allow one to hit a bullseye?

Perhaps it is worth noting what is successful about Cryptonomicon, if at all. At the very least, some of the slow-moving plot points build to satisfying reveals. The shock when Shaftoe’s Filipina lover Glory is discovered to have contracted leprosy is pretty palpable, though the moment is undercut when Shaftoe moves on extremely quickly from that loss:

She reaches up with clublike hands, all wrapped up in long strips of cloth like a mummy’s, and paws the scarf away from her face. Or what used to be face. Now it’s just the front of her skull. (Stephenson 716).

Yet, the next time we meet Shaftoe, (despite pining for Glory the entire book) he only references the incident twice, and in passing (Stephenson 746). Here is an opportunity to go maximal, but Stephenson dodges the dramatic moment.

There is also a certain frisson when we realize that the Japanese soldier Goto Dengo, who we have seemingly randomly followed for hundreds of pages, shows up as an old man in the 1980s plot:

[Goto Dengo] is the only guy in the place who isn’t grinning from ear to ear: apparently when you reach a certain age you are allowed to get away with staring tunnels through other people’s skulls. In the manner of many old people, he looks vaguely startled that they have actually shown up. (Stephenson 852)

That’s great. But why did it take so long to get here? These intriguing and exciting moments are so few and far between, and it’s such a hike to get to them, it almost seems to be in an effort to fool the reader into thinking the struggle is worth it.

Of all the books to show me the virtue of economy, Cryptonomicon has opened my eyes far more than any other text. More is not always more. Every piece must have some purpose. And when the truly dramatic moments happen, it’s time to lean in, not turn away.

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Works Cited

Anders, Charlie Jane. “10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them).” Gizmodo, July 30, 2015. https://io9.gizmodo.com/10-books-you-pretend-to-have-read-and-why-you-should-r-5924625

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon (Harper: New York, 2000).

This is the seventeenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Night Film, Marisha Pessl’s thriller about a disgraced journalist investigating a mysterious Brian de Palma-esque filmmaker.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Night Film is a meandering 587-page novel about a journalist named Scott McGrath who goes down a rabbit hole investigating a mysterious horror filmmaker named Stanislas Cordova after the filmmaker’s daughter Ashley commits suicide.

Pessl’s writing style is very readable; she crafts a lot of interesting ideas about Cordova’s filmography and its unnerving (and perhaps imagined) relationship to the occult. As a filmmaker the mysterious Cordova is depicted as sort of a cross between Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma, though some of the fictional films mentioned in the book possess a shade of DFW’s James O. Incandenza.

What made Night Film noteworthy when it came out in 2013 was how it played with paratexts, in-universe articles and documents featured in the book, and an online webpage which featured additional documents, photographs, and audio clips meant to “augment” the story. In this post, I’ll take a look at these flourishes, which amount to mixed success but mostly feature an admirable presentation and ambition. My main critique with Night Film is that the main character of McGrath is not credible as a war correspondent and is tonally too goofy for this story, and that the twist ending leaves too many plot holes along the way, making Night Film a mildly-entertaining roller coaster that is probably best not ridden twice.

Night Film’s most notable feature is the inclusion of its paratexts. As some of my own fiction work features such in-universe articles, I was interested in how Pessl handled them here. With Random House behind her, Pessl secured the rights to use the masthead fonts of major outlets such as The New York Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Vulture, etc. (Pessl 1-23, 588-592). The formatting is quite good, and coyly photoshopped photographs add to the realism of the experience. The paratexts are often used to establish exposition in a more organic way, and sometimes they are inserted in the text to reflect documents that the characters are reading (such as a dark web Cordova fan site) (Pessl 169-186).

However, I found these documents often a bit lacking because they didn’t feel totally attuned to their supposed publication; a Time photostory featured toward the beginning reads like an overwrought movie blog:

In our modern world of tweeting, TMI, and total exposure, Stanislas Cordova is the exception. He has refused to appear in public or give interviews since Rolling Stone’s 1977 cover feature. Those who have worked with him maintain a strict code of silence. Cordova’s 15-film body of work—gut-twisting journeys through evil underworlds—still enjoys cult status as some of the most terrifying films ever made… TIME takes a brief pictorial look at Cordova, the inscrutable figure who—even when staying silent and out of sight—still creates a storm. (Pessl 5)

To my opinion, this doesn’t read like a TIME photostory; it uses too many dashes to meet AP style guidelines. Some of the other documents are more inspired, such as a clipping of an Amherst alumni newsletter which even features an awful opaque university seal in the busy background of the newsletter’s design spread—the college alumni mailer being a genre where poor design is often par for the course (36).

The added ambition of these documents is that some of them feature a logo of a bird in shadow, which is meant to inform the reader that Marisha Pessl’s website has an “augmented reality” component related to that page. For instance, the image of a CD cover reflecting a piano album by Cordova’s deceased daughter is meant to motivate you to go online and listen to a faux “sample” from that album (Pessl 37, “Night Film Decoder”). This is kind of cool, and some of the multimedia elements certainly add to the experience, though I didn’t quite realize that this additional web material existed until after I had finished reading the book. These elements are not critical to the story, but they deepen the lore, and I know in recent years other storytellers have used the “website lore” function to spackle gaps in the narrative or build fan interest (such as the now-lost but rather elaborate “Peteypedia” site related to the 2019 HBO Watchmen series). That said, while innovative, it seems like these elements are probably better suited to an e-book, and perhaps Night Film was a bit ahead of the curve in attempting a multimodal experiment that doesn’t quite pan out. But narrative formats evolve and change, and I sincerely hope this heralds some new kind of novel in which the narrative is indeed more intimately tied with these audiovisual elements. I mean, if I had the opportunity to add audiovisual content to a novel via a website, I probably wouldn’t say no.

The central problem with Night Film rests in its characters and incoherent plotting. The narrator Scott McGrath is described as a former war correspondent, a National Geographic-type who has written books such as “MasterCard Nation, Hunting Captain Hook: Pirating on the Open Seas, Crud: Dirty Secrets of the Oil Industry, [and] Cocaine Carnivals” (Pessl 26-27). While offering interesting parodies of books such as Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History, the novel is meant to make you believe that McGrath, who has apparently reported on Siberian prisons, is a sad-sack emotional wreck (with a daughter that melts his heart) who also lives an immature lifestyle in the vein of Jimmy McNulty’s mattress on the carpet from The Wire (Pessl 27). To be so productive as a tough-as-nails international reporter, you’d expect McGrath to be a little more put together. Of course, he’s been broken down by a libel scandal which derailed his career, after he accused Cordova of abusing children with faulty evidence, but still, his credibility as a journalist is hard to swallow. Making matters worse is that McGrath’s voice as narrator evokes the overwrought noir voice from The Naked Gun movies, one probably best read (if this were ever adapted to film) by Chris Pratt:

I thought things were looking up when I’d ended up in bed with an attractive bartender named Maisie—until it occurred to me she could feasibly be my distant cousin. Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you realize you’re standing on another trapdoor (Pessl 26-27)

The clichés come a mile a minute, and he charts bad Raymond Chandlerisms over the course of nearly every page. Chandler’s writing worked because there was still an element of emotional restraint in his work; moreover his analogies were extremely specific, avoiding low-hanging fruit such as “rock bottom” and “trapdoor.”

Awkward characterization aside, essentially what the novel boils down to is McGrath weighing the evidence whether Cordova sold his daughter to the devil (in the guise of a creepy priest), or if all the supernatural stuff is a figment of McGrath’s imagination. And yet, we have a scene where McGrath consults Cleo, a modern-day ‘witch’ at a witchcraft shop, and discovers he has been cursed, with some pretty serious evidence:

The shadow—resolutely black on the table—did not naturally follow the object. Instead, it froze as if snagged on something invisible, quivering with tension, the shadow’s tongue elongating, pulling far out behind the figurine before swiftly snapping back into place and moving normally. Amazed, I blinked, leaning in, certain my eyes were playing tricks on me, but within seconds it happened again. (Pessl 413)

This is a lot, and despite this turn of events, the witchcraft plotline is dropped pretty quickly and the mystery of the Cordova daughter’s suicide (spoiler alert) eventually turns on a more conventional explanation—that Cordova did not sell his daughter to the devil, but that Ashley was dying of cancer. That is, until the last few pages of the book, when the narrative takes another left turn and, despite most of the plotlines terminating (not necessarily resolved, just dismissed), McGrath travels to Chile on a hunch, where he finally discovers Cordova in an island cabin:

Somehow, I sensed as soon as he told me, he’d find a way to be gone, faster than the wind across a field. I’d wake up somewhere far away, wondering if I’d imagined it, if he’d been here at all, inside this quiet house poised at the edge of the world. ¶ The one thing I did know, as I stepped toward him, was that he was going to sit down and tell me his truth. ¶ And I would listen. (Pessl 587)

Sentimental prose aside, this ending leaves far more questions than answers, and, like the stereotypical M. Night Shyamalan film ending, the twist is mostly effective in the moment, because the plot of Night Film is so convoluted that it barely supports any specific ending, much less this one. So, does the supernatural occurrence at the witchcraft store support this surprise reveal of Cordova’s whereabouts? That his daughter was really sold to the devil? I don’t know, and frankly, don’t really care.

Because the thing is, the novel’s supernatural angle makes it lose credibility. I couldn’t help but think while reading this book that a much, much scarier and darker book would have seen a more serious version of McGrath face off against a Cordova who did, in fact (as McGrath suspected at the beginning of the story) abuse children (in a fictionalization of the Jeffrey Epstein case). That would have been difficult to read, but also intense in the way that a dark Denis Villeneuve film like Incendies or Prisoners feels like a David Fincher movie with added substance, a David Fincher story that truly hurts. This book is lighthearted and sentimental, and its darkness is lighthearted, and therefore shallow, too. That’s what sinks Night Film for me, despite its innovation in terms of what a multimedia mystery novel might look like in the future.

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Works Cited

Pessl, Marisha. Night Film (Random House: New York, 2013).

“Night Film Decoder,” Marisha Pessl, https://marishapessl.com/night-film-app/.

“Peteypedia,” HBO, 2019. https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia.

This is the sixteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Ian McEwan’s satirical novel about the climate crisis, Solar.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Ian McEwan’s Solar is one of the most high-profile literary examples of cli-fi. What is strange about the novel, however, is that it turns the entire climate change subject into a long-winded, sick joke. The protagonist of Solar is Michael Beard, a Nobel laureate-theoretical physicist who is also one of the most despicable and dislikable characters in twenty-first century fiction. A drunk, schlubby, conniving womanizer and misogynist, Beard’s claim to prize-winning fame is tacking on a little update to Einstein’s theory of relativity, known as the “Einstein-Beard Conflation.” Since this stroke of scholarship, Beard has gone through five marriages and taken a position as a figurehead “director” of a research institute in the UK. The novel is a triptych, taking place over three sections set in 2000, 2005, and 2009, tracking Beard’s spiral into further depravity even as he stumbles toward a project which promotes clean solar energy in Arizona. The only problem, besides his frequent infidelities, is that he plagiarized the solar technology from a staffer who had an affair with his wife—and also happened to die in freak accident.

McEwan quite unsubtly frames Beard as a metaphor for humanity. Just as civilization can’t quite make the jump to clean energy, Beard is utterly incapable of changing his behavior, and by the time he begins to start making amends, he presumably dies of a heart attack, suggesting that we are making moves to clean energy too little, too late to save ourselves. That message is fine, but it’s a bit unclear why we have to wade through Beard’s horrific lifestyle without a counterpoint, since nearly all the characters in the book are just as despicable or compromised as he.

Solar, however, is useful to me for three observations. For one, it features a particular scene that shows how you can shoehorn in ideas by combining a speech with a dramatic element. The other is to demonstrate the weakness of a narrative in which the inciting incident is completely contrived. The third is a more fundamental question: is this novel about climate or one man’s struggle with infidelity? What should be the balance between two elements, one rooted in theme, the other in character?

Let’s start with the successful dramatic element. In the middle of the novel, Beard gives a lecture about solar energy. Throughout the lecture, he recites clichés about solar energy, such as, “Solar will expand, and with your help, and with your and your clients’ enrichment, it will expand faster” (178) Whatever. Beard isn’t saying that much new and interesting here. What makes the speech dramatically compelling is that 1) we know he is ripping off his speech from the late Tom Aldous, the staffer who was having an affair with his wife and 2) that Beard ate a bad fish hors d’oeuvre at the reception before the speech and feels like he is about to vomit the entire time: “the nausea came in on a fresh wave and threatened to disgrace him… he had to keep talking to distract himself. And he had to talk fast. He was being pursued, he had to run” (176). When I started writing the novella version of the Geneva lecture scene in an early draft of my first novel, my undergrad advisor Patrick McGrath recommended I look to Solar for the example of this lecture scene. This example was helpful for framing the idea that a lecture in itself is not dramatic. Some dramatic subtext going on can do wonders for keeping the narrative going.

Despite these flashes of dramatic inspiration, Solar as a novel is hobbled by the fact that the entire narrative turns on the accidental death of Tom Aldous. Despite the fact that Beard possesses the motive to kill Aldous (the researcher is sleeping with Beard’s wife), what happens is that Aldous slips on a polar-bear-hide rug and cracks his skull:

But Aldous never reached Beard; he barely made it two meters into his run. The polar-bear rug on the polished floor was waiting for him. It came alive. (104)

By suggesting the rug “came alive,” McEwan is literally acknowledging that he’s invoking god from the machine. Another writer friend of mine takes issue with this scene in that is an unbelievable accident that would never happen so neatly in real life. From this moment on, the novel gets underway, as Beard frames another romantic rival, Rodney Tarpin, for the death of Aldous, and takes Aldous’ notes and uses them as the basis for his solar venture. So while Beard makes a decision after Aldous’ death, the decision does not expand or change his character, it is almost a passive decision after an absurdly extraordinary occurrence. Perhaps, had Beard had some role in Aldous’ death, like pushing him in a way that Aldous then fell and cracked his skull by happenstance, then the story would feel more realistic. But then Beard would have had to have been a more violent character altogether, and it seems that this was a direction McEwan did not want to take.

Despite this crippling flaw to the story, I wonder if Beard’s womanizing is overplayed in the novel at the expense of the climate theme. While Beard goes on climate-themed artist retreats in Norway and attends solar farm launches in Arizona, the vast majority of the novel’s runtime focuses on Beard fixating and obsessing over women. Perhaps this is part of McEwan’s point, that human nature is focused on sex and personal problems and incapable of meeting the larger problem at hand, but it’s also, like, kind of annoying. How much character work is needed in a book like this? The central problem, aside from the melodrama, is that Beard stole Aldous’ ideas. A little bit of infidelity goes a long way, and the fact that this element pervades every moment of Beard’s existence betrays the idea that this guy actually won the Nobel Prize and therefore must have been brilliant at some point. When Beard’s big fraud catches up to him, the novel picks up in its dramatic tension, but the vast amount of womanizing is not humorous but tedious and uncomfortable. Maybe if Beard were slightly more likable it would be more successful, but when the protagonist is this unlikeable the novel is hard to buy into, emotionally and intellectually.

So that’s where I stand on Solar. Deeply helpful for showcasing how to handle in-scene dramatic structure, but failing on a number of points that bring it crashing down. And yet McEwan is a great writer, so even a bad novel of his is still solid by other counts.

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Works Cited

McEwan, Ian. Solar (New York: Anchor Books, 2010).

This is the fifteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder, an upmarket adventure novel in the tradition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Spoilers ahead, so beware.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

In the climactic pages of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, the protagonist Marina, an Indian-American scientist, trades a deaf-mute Native American boy to cannibals for a captured white married man whom she wants to sleep with. Yeah, I can’t believe I wrote that sentence, either. But such is the bizarre nature of State of Wonder, a book that presents itself as a modern, feminist update of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now but instead leans further into the absurdity of such a narrative and also indulges in the problems of those earlier narratives without a more balanced attempt at a corrective. This is an adventure novel with very little adventure that also somehow perceives itself as high literature. The result is a spectacular mess. Her book is thus a lesson in “what not to do” in writing a modern adventure novel.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of those classic, paradoxical novels that condemns imperialism while also dehumanizing the people the book laments that imperialism is oppressing. Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now borrowed the frame narrative of that story while also implying modern Vietnamese were cannibals. Alas. But the tried-and-true setup is that Marlow, an agent of a colonial conglomerate, is sent upriver in a jungle to track down Kurtz, another Western agent who has gone rogue. In State of Wonder, Marina works for a shadowy biotech company in Minnesota that has sent Dr. Annick Swenson into the Amazon jungle to study a population of native women that do not experience menopause because they chew a mysterious tree bark; Swenson’s assignment is to develop a fertility drug from this bark. But then the shadowy doctor goes rogue and stops listening to the company, and we have our Heart of Darkness setup.

A first agent is sent, Marina’s colleague Anders, who is soon reported dead. Marina, who is romantically attracted to Anders and is also having an affair with the CEO of the company, Mr. Fox, is sent to Manaus to find out about Anders’ body.

I first read State of Wonder in high school, and all I remembered was that I didn’t like it very much. When I read it again for this assignment, I remembered why. The first chapter is inspired, and roars through the inciting incident of the news of Anders’ passing and Marina’s acceptance of the quest. But such a quick start means that we have to endure an entire chapter of flashbacks through the device of Marina’s malaria medication, which happens to give her nightmare-flashbacks as a side effect. Why can’t a character just have nightmares, or just have flashbacks? No malaria drug is required; in this genre we know flashbacks are necessary, and given the circumstances, nightmares might be justified on their own. The device is forced and overused, and is diluted by the sheer quantity of flashbacks and backstory we receive in Chapter 2. Not only is Marina grieving the apparent loss of her colleague, but the long-ago death of her father, her traumatic failure in performing a Caesarean section in medical school under the supervision of Swenson, and her rumination over her toxic relationship with Mr. Fox. It’s too much, all at once.

The book goes precipitously downhill when Marina encounters Swenson on page 124, and engages with her in extended dialogues for the remainder of the book. If Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now were built upon teasing out the mystery of Kurtz, State of Wonder fails spectacularly by giving the game away too soon. Swenson talks like a robotic villain; worse, the extended dialogues between Marina and Swenson, which might be interesting in small doses, are overexposed, overwrought, and sap the narrative of tension since confronting the mysterious doctor repeatedly is much less interesting than had she been held back in the shadows.

Most of the doctors in the Amazon sneer at Western medical ethical norms like cartoon villains in James Cameron movies, challenging the believability of the narrative. When Swenson persuades Marina to supervise the delivery of a native baby despite extremely poor medical conditions, Swenson shrugs off all the ethical problems and pressures Marina (who dropped out of medical school) into submission:

Marina sat back on her heels. “The point is we don’t have anything approaching sterile conditions. The chance of her dying from a postoperative infection is enough to indicate that turning the baby is worth a try. I don’t have a nurse to help me with a surgery, I don’t have an anesthesiologist.”

“Do you think we have an anesthesiologist around here?” [Dr. Swenson said].

“What do you have?”…

“Ketamine. And don’t go throwing gloves away. This isn’t Johns Hopkins.”

“Ketamine? Are we planning on sending her out to a disco later? Who in the world uses Ketamine?”

“Here’s the news, Dr. Singh, you get what you get, and I was lucky to get that.” (279)

Western doctors, even doctors in the field, would never discuss such shortcomings in conditions so casually. And while the Hippocratic oath might support their action in delivering this child, it certainly seems like they are doing more damage than good.

And whenever the science of the story indicates a plot hole, the book name-drops a vague concept to magically solve the problem, sort of like how the “electromagnetic pulse” cliché is abused by screenwriters in thriller films:

“What about the blood samples?” Marina asked. “Can you actually read hormone levels on such a small amount of blood?”

“Nanotechnology,” Budi said. “Brave new world.”

Marina nodded. (265)

One word of nanotechnology and the subject is dropped. Glad that was cleared up. Because the whole tree-bark fertility concept involves an unlikely process of symbiosis in the Amazonian ecosystem, perhaps had Patchett just avoided the mention of hormone evaluation in the jungle might be a better solution than name-dropping “nanotech.”

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Soon, at Swenson’s Amazon base, Marina learns that Swenson has taken the drug herself—and that she’s pregnant. “How quickly we put our medical ethics aside,” Swenson says. “I developed the drug. If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself” (247). This is campy, straight out of an Alien movie, but the novel plays it dead serious. It gets even campier when Mr. Fox arrives in the Amazon and Dr. Swenson informs him that she is pregnant:

For a moment Mr. Fox was too far behind. He had missed the rodent trails, the studies in higher mammals. He had no knowledge of a first efficacious dose or the multidose safety studies. He had seen no reports on the probability of technical success, and then suddenly he was six months into the first human dose… Given all there was to absorb it took a moment for the news to settle in, but when it did the look on Mr. Fox’s face was as tender and pleased and surprised as it had been on a night thirty-five years before when his own wife Mary had made a similar announcement. He took a few tentative steps towards Dr. Swenson. He softened his voice. “How far along?” (307)

Like a Weyland-Yutani corporate mole from the Alien franchise, Mr. Fox becomes a corporate villain despite his sympathetic characterization from earlier in the novel. It’s kind of hilarious that Mr. Fox would excuse all the lack of scientific protocol for drug development and instead was just sinisterly intent on the successful impregnation of an elderly woman, à la Ripley’s eventual succumbing to the xenomorphs in Alien 3. And I could excuse this campiness if the book was campy and played up the cartoon elements. But State of Wonder remains so self-serious that the book appears to be in earnest.

What makes this earnestness more problematic is that the native population being experimented on is mostly treated as window-dressing, not totally divorced from their infamous treatment in Heart of Darkness. For example: “At some point during the night the fire juggling, fiercely screaming Lakashi had been replaced by a working-class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame” (195). And also: “Two small girls came by wearing shorts and no shirts, each of them with a tiny monkey around her neck that held on to its own prehensile tail with its hands to form a clasp” (196). While these wide shots and close-ups might be expected for the introduction of the natives into the narrative, the novel never really goes deeper into the natives or singles them out apart from Easter, the deaf-mute native child which Dr. Swenson has adopted and Marina falls in love with. And also betrays.

This leads us to the aforementioned climax, when Marina gives the deaf-mute boy up for Anders. At first, when Marina arrives in a canoe with Easter on the edge of the cannibal tribe’s territory, the potential dilemma is pretty compelling. Anders, who is alive, says the cannibals want them to exchange the boy for him. Very little time is spent on this dilemma, or the dark nature of Anders’ request. Exchange the boy (whom Marina has become attached to) for Anders (the married colleague she is here to rescue and who she has a crush on)?

In the end, Marina assents to Anders’ demand quite easily and gives the boy to the cannibals. Patchett plays the moment to horror: “The look on the boy’s face as his eyes went from Marina and Anders and back to her again was one of terrified misunderstanding” (341). And yet Marina remains passive. She feels guilty as she and Anders escape (“she had taken him [Easter] into the jungle and given him away and there was nothing that anyone could say in face of that”), but not so guilty, as she immediately seduces Anders as soon as they return to the base (342, 349-350). The devil’s bargain is short-lived, as Anders returns to his wife and Marina is left alone in Minnesota. The end.

I wonder what the conclusion would have been like if Marina rejected Anders’ advice and escaped with Easter. That would be the more poignant choice. She would have been active in her fate, and betrayed the man she (sort of?) loved because of her love for the child.

My edition of State of Wonder features a post-script interview with Patchett. Originally a short story writer, Patchett explained that once she became a novelist, there was no going back:

I had come to know the pleasures of space and time, of watching my characters make mistakes and then giving them the chance to try and rectify their circumstances. I had developed a fondness for describing things, for adding back story. I had let a reckless number of minor characters wander into the landscape, and now I didn’t want to give them up (6).

This quote is revelatory for several reasons. Patchett writes in an improvisational manner, with few details planned in advance. She loves her characters, and her love of Dr. Swenson burdens too much of a compelling idea through overuse. Marina’s backstory is, dare I say, overdeveloped. In this novel, there is a reckless number of minor characters who don’t go anywhere. With State of Wonder, these problems burden what could have been a straightforward genre structure. At least Patchett, unlike some of the other authors I’ve written about for these annotations, is self-aware about her process, if not in terms of the novel she wrote.

Perhaps the best lesson from State of Wonder is that a little self-awareness in the narrative goes a long way.

Works Cited

Patchett, Ann. State of Wonder (HarperCollins: New York, 2011).

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This is the fourteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford’s magisterial narrative history of the tragic quest to reach the South Pole by the rival expeditions of polar explorers Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

“The poles of the earth had been an obsession of Western man. It could be argued against, but not argued away. Since the obsession was there, it had to be exorcised, and the sooner the better” (3). So begins Roland Huntford’s exhaustive account of the historic race to the South Pole between British explorer Robert F. Scott and his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen. The 1911-1912 competition would lead to the deaths of Scott and four of his men, as well as the public spurning of Amundsen’s achievement in reaching the pole first.

The historical example of Scott and Amundsen loomed large in my own writing, the example that inspired my MFA thesis novel. But until I read this book, effectively a double-biography of Scott and Amundsen, I had been unaware of the startling complexities in their tale, wrinkles I have tried to amplify in drawing out the allegories between these real-life mortal enemies and my own dueling characters.

Huntford’s book is a mixture of narrative nonfiction and extensive archival research. For much of its runtime, it performs the difficult challenge of translating boring polar diaries into a readable narrative. Much of that story drags with a long build up and detailed explanations about polar exploration technology, but this drawback comes with the territory. It must be said that Huntford was a master of the polar narrative genre—he also published lengthy biographies of Fridtjof Nansen (Amundsen’s polar mentor and an important figure in international relations) and Ernest Shackleton, whose Antarctic exploits through the bestselling book Endurance are better known. But The Last Place on Earth is a revisionist narrative, and in reintroducing Amundsen through previously untranslated Norwegian accounts, Huntford also performs a hit job on Scott.

Huntford indicates his agenda from the epigraph, a quote from Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the preface to the History of the First World War: “It is more important to provide material for a true verdict than to gloss over disturbing facts so that individual reputations may be preserved.” Huntford’s account reveals that Scott’s final diaries were edited to omit his bitterness toward Amundsen and to hide the mental breakdown of his companion Evans, who died on the journey (546-547). Moreover, Huntford argues Scott’s approach was flawed from the beginning. Whereas Amundsen was methodical, efficient, and unpretentious, Huntford argues that Scott was incompetent, vain, and reckless, leading by emotion and pride rather than a sober evaluation of the realities (xiv-xv). Scott brought ponies to the Antarctic. After the ponies died, Scott advocated for “man-hauling”—i.e., human bearing of sledges (rather than enlist the help of sled dogs, which Amundsen championed, having recognized their potential from visiting Inuit tribes in North America). Scott’s team was reluctant to challenge him, a weakness that proved fatal (379). The tremendous calorie deficit implicit in the man-hauling approach, Huntford argues, was directly the cause of the infamous death of the explorer and his companions in a blizzard just 11 miles from their next supply depot (378-379, 526).

Broad overview aside, I want to hone in on two moments in particular—one, how Huntford describes the bizarre but unremarkable location of the South Pole once it had been reached by both parties, and two, how Huntford treats the public reputations of Scott and Amundsen in the years that followed.

When Amundsen finally arrives at the South Pole, Huntford argues the polar explorer felt a sense of emptiness:

Amundsen had learned what the Duke of Wellington had meant when in the moment of victory he wrote that “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Such, then, was the attainment of the South Pole; a muted feast; a thing of paradox, of classic detachment; of disappointment almost. It was the antithesis, conceivably deliberate, to Peary at the other end of the earth, two and a half years before: “The Pole at last. The prize of three centuries. My dream and goal for twenty years. Mine at last!” (469)

In quoting the example of Wellington and Robert Peary, Huntford draws on the examples of figures that would have been more immediately familiar to Amundsen. Now, this is the moment the book has been building toward for nearly 500 pages, and Huntford quite dramatically emphasizes the moment’s understatement, the disappointing nature in knowingly attaining a monumental goal and that one’s life will never exceed these heights. In particular, there is something more hollow at the end of this road for Amundsen, who only chose to go for the South Pole after Peary and his own rival (the fraudulent Frederick Cook) both claimed to reach the North Pole (though most today believe neither actually succeeded). And after the North Pole was “discovered,” repetition in the form of imitation could never garner Amundsen the same respect, a reputation further challenged after Scott’s death overshadowed Amundsen’s accomplishment.

Huntford also carefully underscores the bizarre nature of the South Pole, a moment he exoticizes to dramatic effect:

The day after arrival was, as [Amundsen] put it, “extremely agitated.” The Poles are Looking-Glass world; a graphic illustration of how the ideal, necessarily, means a reduction to absurdity. Familiar concepts break down. There is only one direction; at the North Pole, South; at the South Pole, North. The meridians converge to vanishing point, so that longitude is meaningless, and only latitude remains. Fixing the position of this strange spot is an alien and arduous exercise. (471)

It is without a doubt no human had ever been to the South Pole before Amundsen, and the “breaking down” of geographical abstractions further gives the sense that these explorers are in a place where humans are not meant to tread, and also points out the artifice of longitude and latitude in the first place. Notably, an alien location such as the Antarctic where the strange is the norm (as in the Wonderland works of Lewis Carroll), later served as the ideal location for Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which appeared twenty four years after the Scott-Amundsen expeditions.

In the book’s conclusion, Huntford accounts for the reasons why Scott become a martyr and Amundsen was forgotten. Not only was Scott a “suitable hero for a nation in decline,” the spin was that Scott “died because his heart was broken by defeat at the Pole; ergo, the fault was not his own, but that of a man who had the impatience to get there first” (543-545). Amundsen, was further cast by newspapers as being merely “lucky” (545). That being said, the insanity of glorifying a bungler at the expense of a professional can be appreciated by modern observers of Fox News’ spin coverage of the Trump Administration.

But the media which supported Scott’s heroism was not an extremist TV station but the most influential voices in British journalism. Scott’s literary-style journals gave them a source to draw from. Amundsen, more reserved in his pride, was incapable of advocating for himself:

The world largely saw the tale through Scott’s eyes. As Scott’s Last Expedition, his diaries were rapidly published and, quite simply, he was a better writer than Amundsen. Amundsen lacked the power of advocacy. He was too much the man of action; like so many of his kind, he squandered his talent on his deeds. Living the moment so intensely, he was denied the surplus energy to convey it to others. “The last of the Vikings” expected his deeds to speak for themselves; they were in any case his art. Scott, by contrast, seemed to have sought experience as a means to other ends; as the path to promotion, the raw material for writing. He appealed to everyman, where Amundsen did not try to counterbalance Scott’s masterly self-justification. His literary talent was his trump. It was as if he had reached out from his buried tent to take revenge. (546)

Huntford insinuates that Scott wrote his journals with the intent to aggrandize his legacy at the expense of Amundsen, which reads as a bit far-fetched. Far more likely was Scott more depressed and overcome with emotion than seeking to specifically shiv Amundsen from beyond the grave. Ironically, in my novel I have positioned Freeley to be more like the historical Amundsen—worse at self-promotion, stubborn to a fault. My Nick Amundsen, however, caters only to public perception, in a dramatic reversal of the historical example.

The Last Place on Earth radically transformed the narrative surrounding Scott and Amundsen. It caused a fury upon publication in 1979 and its adaptation as a 1985 TV series which undercut the Scott legend perpetuated after his death. As a result, Amundsen’s historical perception has been restored somewhat at the expense of Scott, showcasing the see-saw nature of historical memory. As Paul Theroux states in the introduction, “yet in almost every instance, Amundsen makes the right, most astute judgment and Scott the wrong, most ill-informed one, which is why this book seems to me so valuable, for it is a book about myth-making and heroism and self-deception, the ingredients of nationalism” (xvi). In that way this book is a historical parable, a journey where the villain is made a hero and vice versa. It’s a little more subtle than The Dark Knight’s thesis, “you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.”

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Works Cited

Huntford, Roland. The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole (Modern Library: New York, 1999).

This is the thirteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, his widely lauded, magic-realist take on the historic (and metaphorically-named) “underground railroad” in which runaway slaves escaped to the North in the years before the US Civil War.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

I am fortunate to call Colson Whitehead a former instructor, and though his workshops were a joy to me in college, looking back he did not offer much insight into his own process or aesthetic. Which was a disappointment, since Whitehead is one of the most prominent and successful voices in fiction today, as well as someone who likes to incorporate genre elements into his work, which bookstores label as “Literature” with a capital L.

Before reading The Underground Railroad, I had read The Intuitionist, Whitehead’s inventive neo-noir novel about elevator inspectors, a book I enjoyed for its funny take on rival escalator inspectors as well as its incorporation of an homme fatale to counter the novel’s female protagonist. However, one thing I found frustrating with that book is that, for the most part, it didn’t have defined chapter breaks—something I think detective novels really need to facilitate pacing—and instead just kind of kept going and going, interrupted by occasional scene breaks.

Structure isn’t a problem with Underground Railroad, which may have also assisted in this book’s massive popular success. This novel is organized into chapters, predominantly chapters about the book’s runaway slave protagonist, Cora, interspersed with shorter chapters about various white opponents who are either tacitly or actively complicit with the institution of slavery.

The Underground Railroad’s tantalizingly simple and alluring premise—what if the physical railroad was real, and not just a metaphor?—is boldly framed as Cora’s Odyssey from the South to the North, but the novel itself also seems strangely detached from Cora’s plight. The premise is such that this novel could have easily been 500 pages and been even more dramatic with its reversals, if Cora found refuge and capture within a few more scenarios, but instead Underground Railroad comes in at an industry-standard 313 pages, and therefore feels a little sanitized, a book crafted exclusively to be a hit, to be enjoyed by critics and airport book-buyers simultaneously. There’s no shame in being a hit, but I wonder if Underground Railroad lost some of Whitehead’s trademark charm in the editing room. Overall, I think Underground Railroad ultimately succeeds because it is also a picaresque novel in the tradition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; both are novels in which the hypocrisy and complicity of white society regarding prejudice toward Blacks is heightened and examined across various layers of social strata.

After an intense opening section which explores Cora’s origins and ancestors on a plantation in Georgia, Cora discovers the literally-underground railroad at about page 67, roughly 25% into the novel. This pacing is worth noting, because it ensures that the book gets to its premise quickly.

And Underground Railroad’s thesis comes as soon as the railroad is revealed, when Lumbly, a train conductor, tells the runaways Cora and Caesar:

“If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” (Whitehead 69)

Each section tests this hypothesis, as every stop on Cora’s journey reveals a different type of racism, a different type of oppression. Thus Whitehead’s novel is less about Cora’s journey than an intellectual Odyssey through America’s most evil impulses, moving through many windows of society to show racism in picaresque fashion.

One of the most interesting of these sections is Cora’s sojourn in Charleston, South Carolina, a place where Blacks enjoy seeming relative freedom, though in fact they are being sterilized in Tuskegee-esque experiments. Whitehead cleverly uses a museum display which Cora works at as a human prop to develop the ideology of Charleston society:

The first room was Scenes from Darkest Africa. A hut dominated the exhibit, its walls wooden poles lashed together under a peaked thatch roof. Cora retreated into its shadows when she needed a break from the faces. There was a cooking fire, the flames represented by shards of red glass; a small, roughly made bench; and assorted tools, gourds, and shells. Three large black birds hung from the ceiling on a wire. The intended effect was that of a flock circling over the activity of the natives. They reminded Cora of the buzzards that chewed the flesh of the plantation dead when they were put on display. (Whitehead 109)

Whitehead’s vision of the Charleston museum display involves interesting atmospherics while also reemphasizing the Heart of Darkness Social Darwinism of the exhibit, one that means to reinforce white supremacy. Whitehead’s description does double-duty in that the buzzards link to Cora’s experience and give her pause to her traumatic past, while also connecting her experience as a prop to that of crucified bodies on the plantation.

The second, even more nefarious exhibit that Whitehead outlines is a sanitized version of the Atlantic slave trade—one that pretends the Atlantic journey was pleasant and not a murderous, genocidal exercise:

The soothing blue walls of Life on the Slave Ship evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a frigate’s deck, around the mast, various small barrels, and coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic, trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with various small tasks, a kind of apprentice… (Whitehead 110)

Because Whitehead has already staged the Atlantic crossing in his prologue about Ajarry, Cora’s grandmother (“Chained head to toe, head to toe, in exponential misery” (Whitehead 4)), the text is heightening the contrast between what actually happened and how American propaganda disguises the truth.

Finally, we see Cora react to an exhibit supposedly depicting her own former existence—a full-scale diorama of the plantation:

Typical Day on the Plantation allowed her to sit at a spinning wheel and rest her feet, the seat as sure as her old block of sugar maple. Chickens stuffed with sawdust pecked at the ground; from time to time Cora tossed imaginary seed at them. She had numerous suspicions about the accuracy of the African and ship scenes but was an authority in this room. She shared her critique. Mr. Fields did concede that spinning wheels were not often used outdoors, at the foot of a slave’s cabin, but countered that while authenticity was their watchword, the dimensions of the room forced certain concessions. (Whitehead 110)

The fact Cora had suspicions about the African and ship scenes adds to her resistance to performing in this final narrative. As a former slave, she criticizes the inclusion of the spinning wheel, which softens the reality of her servitude, and as a dry humorous touch, Whitehead’s curator concedes that spinning wheels are not accurate but such “concessions” are a result of the minimal space, a realistic cop-out to the tremendous flaws of the exhibit.

Through these three scenes, Whitehead contrasts the reality of Cora’s experience and that of her ancestors with that of the sanitized narrative of the museum. He is using setting as a tool for establishing theme and message and also character development, pushing Cora to place even less trust in the seemingly more generous white authorities in Charleston. Whitehead’s skill at using description for multiple purposes is certainly an aspect I can incorporate more in my own writing, which often relies too much on description as cinematic window dressing without being necessarily cloaked in other aspects of theme and message.

The last aspect I am most fascinated with in Underground Railroad is how Whitehead takes care to flesh out Cora and Caesar’s opponents, such as the slave-catcher Ridgeway, the “benevolent” slave owner Mrs. Gardner who deceived Caesar and his family into servitude on false promises of future freedom, and finally Ethel, the long-suffering wife of abolitionist Martin who long dreamt of being a white savior:

Ever since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light. She dreamed of the ship that would take her, a magnificent schooner with sails like angel wings, cutting across the violent sea. The perilous journey into the interior, up rivers, wending mountain passes, and the dangers escaped: lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides. And then the village, where the natives receive her as an emissary of the Lord, an instrument of civilization. In gratitude the niggers lift her to the sky, praising her name: Ethel, Ethel. (Whitehead 191)

Each of these characters depict a different example of racism and/or the doctrine of white supremacy, and Ethel’s section is particularly haunting, reflective of a missionary spirit that is not for the glory of God, but for the glory of the minister at the expense of the “natives,” a distinctly American pathology, historically speaking. More damningly, several aspects of Ethel’s dreams reflect pulp tropes that have been inspired from romanticizing imperialist ventures: “lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides” (Whitehead 191). Whitehead raises a critical point that, if not handled carefully, this type of pulp adventure storytelling can reinforce existing prejudices. Ethel’s dream to be a white savior is also informed by the ideologies Whitehead raises in the museum scene; throughout the book he is developing and explaining how so many Americans for so many years (and still today) prevaricate their worldviews to tolerate slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination; in Whitehead’s telling, there were and are far more ways to be racist than to be an abolitionist.

The importance of Lumbly’s “Ride the rails”/ “you’ll find the true voice of America” line is underscored by its repetition toward the end of the novel, when Cora recalls the line as she finally arrives at a temporary sanctuary in Indiana: “It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness” (Whitehead 262). The darkness Whitehead refers to is not only the literal “underground” nature of the railroad but also the darkness of the whites who oppress Cora and the Black community. Though the book ends on a (slightly) hopeful note, with Cora’s final escape to the West, most of the book is not (Whitehead 312-313). Furthermore, we know as readers that in California Cora will face the same discrimination she has confronted elsewhere; escape is impossible. Underground Railroad thus functions as a modern update and more digestible version of the type of storytelling in Invisible Man, an intellectual exposé disguised as a magical realist adventure novel.

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Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (Vintage International: New York, 2010).

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist (Anchor Books: New York, 2000).

-----------. The Underground Railroad (Anchor Books: New York, 2016),

This is the twelfth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, a book-length essay about why it’s so hard to dramatize the problem of climate change.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

In Amitav Ghosh’s book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist tackles many issues related to climate change, but most interesting for my purposes (as a writer working on a climate change narrative) is his argument why climate change does not lend itself to Western storytelling conventions.

Ghosh tells a story about how in 1978 he survived a tornado in Delhi—the first tornado to strike Delhi in recorded history (14). Ghosh was particularly haunted by this event, and he wanted to someday include this episode as part of a novel. But he could never make the scene work:

In reflecting on this, I find myself asking, what would I make of such a scene were I to come across it in a novel written by someone else? I suspect that my response would be one of incredulity; I would be inclined to think that the scene was a contrivance of last resort. Surely only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability? (16)

In such fashion, the randomness of a natural disaster, being over-the-top and not linked to a character’s decisions, would never stand the test of literary fiction. That is why disaster movies like Twister and the climate-themed The Day After Tomorrow (the latter based on the very-real possibility that the Gulf Stream might shift away from North America and Europe), are often derided as popcorn pleasures. Can you write a “serious” novel about climate? About long processes that last millions of years? About catastrophe?

Ghosh thinks not, because on the off chance a novel does consider vast events of magnitude and consequence, the novel ceases to be considered “serious.”

Novels, on the other hand, conjure up worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delimited horizon of a novel—when they intrude, the temptation to lapse into satire, as in Ian McEwan’s Solar, becomes almost irresistible. (61-62)

Ian McEwan’s Solar can only make climate change topics interesting by turning the whole narrative into a joke, a sex farce about a horrible man’s infidelities and machinations.

What, then, is acceptable to satisfy the tenets of Western literary fiction? Ironically, a negative review of a non-Western novel helps Ghosh define the constraints. Ghosh quotes from a John Updike review of the Arab novel Cities of Salt (by Abdul Rahman Munif) that paradoxically pointed out the limitations of the Western narrative conventions:

Here is what he had to say about Cities of Salt:

“It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif… appears to be… insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face or a manner or a developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest; and, this being the first third of a trilogy, what intelligible conflicts and possibilities do emerge remain serenely unresolved. There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance—which since ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe’ has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle; ‘Cities of Salt’ is concerned, instead, with men in the aggregate.” (76-77, emphasis added)

For Updike, a novel consists of an “individual moral adventure,” and a novel that considers “men in the aggregate” is incompatible with the idea of a novel. This observation points to a larger symptom of our individualistic culture—our characters are masters of their own fate and are never burdened by matters beyond their control. They have positive qualities, flaws of character that contribute to decisions which determine their trajectory, but seemingly random acts of environmental consequences do not burden them. Cities of Salt, rather, tells the story of sudden Arabian prosperity via the oil trade in a collectivist mode. This seems as good a strategy as any to tackle a societal narrative, though it’s easy to see how if the story were to be Westernized (as in, packaged for a Hollywood spectacle), Cities of Salt: The Motion Picture would focus on one character solving a societal issue alone (for example, as was the case in Blood Diamond, regarding the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone).

Due to the constraining focus of literary fiction on the individual, Ghosh asks whether other genres might be better suited. Gothic and its successor, horror, are eternally popular and involve supernatural happenings (66-73). Perhaps science fiction, with its focus on apocalyptic changes, such as in the enduring works of Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick, is a genre better equipped to handle the questions of climate change:

After all, there is a now a new genre of science fiction called “climate fiction” or cli-fi. But cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. (72)

For Ghosh, cli-fi’s weakness is its reliance on the future, when he believes that climate fiction should be set now, in the present, or even in the early industrial past. Cli-fi thus wrongly distances stories from the present and abstracts them to a time in the future so that readers can dodge their own engagement with the issue.

And yet, the author is still hopeful, despite the harrowing consequences of the process unfolding before our eyes. As Ghosh concludes, “I would like to believe that out of this struggle will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes than those that preceded it… and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature” (162).

Works Cited

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016).

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This is the eleventh chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If you care, big spoilers below. CW: Adult content.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

In the mid-2000s, one 645-page book could be seen at every airport and subway in the world. It was not Harry Potter, or a Grisham, or anything else. It was an edgy Swedish mystery. Adding to the allure of the Millennium Trilogy was the author’s death in 2004 and the posthumous year-by-year release of each book, fully completed before his death. The odd publication history made these books a big deal; the Swedish film adaptations and the lone David Fincher movie also built up the book’s presence in the cultural zeitgeist. And just like that, the Swedish crime phenomenon vanished, immediately replaced on the bestseller list by Gone Girl (but not without giving us the hilariously bad The Snowman Jo Nesbø adaptation.) I mean, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (TGWTDT) probably came and went so quickly because Larsson died, and he couldn’t write any more books, though ghostwriters of sequels (including film sequels) have tried, and tried.

When I told my MFA thesis advisor Chris Coake I was reading this book, he told me that, “isn’t TGWTDT delightfully bad?” But that’s the thing. I missed the Larsson train when it went by, only watching the Fincher movie, but had never engaged with the source material. So coming to this now, I was irritated by the book’s length, its baffling portrayal of Lisbeth Salander’s title character (who is alternately helpless or a super-genius), and the bizarre pacing of the book, which is glacial for hundreds of paces, speeds up as Mikael Blomkvist finally starts solving the mystery, and then solves it too easily, as the bad guy is caught and killed in quick succession, leading to a petering-out ending that stretches for hundreds of more pages. Overall, the experience was not the best, but the book is still decent, I think? In this essay, I’m going to discuss the inconsistent portrayal of Salander and then the pacing and structure of the book. Notably, David Fincher’s movie tried to adapt the book’s structure in a faithful but more efficient approach, which I find a strange but endearing way to apologize for the book’s structural shortcomings.

The most gratuitous section of the novel is obviously the part where Salander is sexually abused by her social worker, Nils Bjurman, and she takes revenge. There are probably better ways to show your main character is a badass than have her suffer through this stuff. But I couldn’t help but cringe terribly with sentences from Salander’s POV, such as: “Bjurman was on his way to being a Major Problem” (Larsson 220). I’m supposed to believe Salander is a hacker genius but also that she thinks in weird, simple sentences? Adding to the trashiness of this section is how Larsson dives into Bjurman’s POV, like after he forces her to have oral sex with him:

“Hard-nosed bitch. She really is fucking retarded. He handed her the cheque he had written when she was in the bathroom. This is better than a whore. She gets paid with her own money” (Larsson 244)

I already understood that Bjurman was a monster, and didn’t need any of this to understand his corruption and grotesque worldview.

Though Salander’s portrayal feels problematic, it’s worth saying that Larsson’s intent was probably in the right place? Portraying a spectrum-y character and their struggles with the abuse of social services seems important to his authorial intent (as the Swedish title of the novel is Men Who Hate Women). But still, a leaner TGWDT probably would have dropped this whole section and had her hired to become Blomkvist’s research assistant wayyy earlier. She joins the main plot of the book on page 357, at around the midpoint. This is very, very slow, especially for a mystery.

Which brings us back to the glaring problem of the book’s pacing. Larsson was a reporter, and the detective-journalist-protagonist Blomkvist seems consciously modeled on the life Larsson seems to have wished he had. This probably also might explain the strange narrative structure of TGWTDT; throughout his writing life Larsson thus somehow avoided being indoctrinated in three-act structure.

Michael Tucker from the “Lessons from the Screenplay” YouTube channel explains some of these problems in a video essay by discussing how David Fincher approached adapting the book. In Tucker’s account, the Fincher adaptation (screenplay written by Steven Zaillian) has five acts. The first act sees Blomkvist lose his libel lawsuit against corrupt magnate-oligarch Wennerström and accept Henrik Vanger’s proposal to solve the murder of his grandniece. The second act chronicles Salander’s battles with Bjurman as Blomkvist begins his investigation. In the third act, Salander and Blomkvist finally team up (and become romantically involved), and in act four, Martin Vanger is revealed as the killer and is quickly defeated (by a random car accident).

But then there’s act five, what Tucker calls “the weirdest act,” which sees Salander take down Wennerström and her subsequent romantic rejection from Blomkvist. While the fifth act solves the initial plot problem of Wennerström, it feels superfluous because the sub-plot has extended far beyond the parameters of the A-plot. Admittedly, the film offers a cleaned-up version of this plot, which feels much messier in the novel. Tucker defends this narrative decision by explaining that each act does have a mini-plot arc on its own, so that the movie doesn’t lose its way. He develops his defense of the film’s structure based on Fincher’s wish to make a film that was “thoughtful, adult, interesting, complex and challenging.”

I’ve thought a lot about this idea of an unconventional plot structure in my own work. Various versions had more acts and an attempt to address “fractal theory” as espoused by John Yorke in his craft book Into the Woods (cited in the Tucker video)—the idea that “every act will contain all the essential elements of story: protagonist, antagonist, inciting incident, journey, crisis, climax and—occasionally—resolution” (qtd. in Tucker).

While one can make a good movie from a sloppy book, a sloppy book is not elevated by a good movie. The Larsson novel’s awkward pacing might have been solved by structural revisions that Larsson never got the chance to make, given his premature death. And yet, it seemed that few readers had much trouble with these structural decisions, considering that the book was such a blockbuster hit, which adds to the baffling enigma of the whole trilogy’s success. By the time Salander says to herself, “What a pathetic fool you are, Salander,” and tosses her prospective gift of an Elvis sign to Blomkvist into a dumpster, we can’t wait for the novel to end (Larsson 643).

However, at its heart, the core of the story (regarding the mystery of the girl who disappeared on an island which was completely walled off) is a particularly arresting locked-room mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie. However, because it takes so long to get there, and so long to wrap up the novel after that plot is solved, TGWTDT will always occupy a strange entry in the “literary” mystery-thriller genre, as an intentionally poorly structured mystery. Somehow, the narrative captured lightning in a bottle with its themes about the abuse of women, hacking, neo-Nazis, and Scandinavian noir, and at least three of these topics are relevant in 2021. One still wishes that the novel lived up better to its hype.

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Works Cited

Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf: New York, 2008).

Tucker, Michael. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” uploaded by Lessons from the Screenplay, January 30, 2018.

This is the tenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Sam Esmail’s masterful pilot for MR. ROBOT, his cyberhacking paranoid thriller series that ran on USA Network from 2015-2019. (Wait, this show is now almost 10 years old??). If you care, big spoilers below for season 1 and 4 for this now “classic” show.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

“Our democracy has been hacked.” The tagline of MR. ROBOT’s first season, released in 2015, feels moot now. In the year 2024, democracy has been hacked many times over. Not by a social justice-terrorist hacker group in the vein of Sam Esmail’s TV series’ “f.society,” but you know, hindsight is the year 2020. The first season of Mr. Robot depicts a post-Recession Obama-era New York in which multinationals (namely the Enron-esque “Evil Corp”) control the future of the millennial generation through high debt and oppressive banking practices. By the end of Season One, the hackers try to erase that debt by hacking Evil Corp’s servers, and after their success, the world order becomes unglued.

I watched Mr. Robot’s first season in the lead-up to the 2016 election. The night Donald Trump was elected, I could not help but think of Mr. Robot, and how the show had predicted the end of normalcy. Nowadays, what had seemed shocking on television—the show going through with the great hack—now seemed prescient for our real-life experience. In 2015, we were already teetering on the edge of the abyss, and for the better part of the decade since, we’ve been falling deeper into it.

In this essay, I’d like to focus in on two-back-to-back scenes from the pilot of Mr. Robot, the opening in which we meet our unreliable protagonist, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek, in his star-making role), for the first time and the conflict he faces. Ideally, the first scene of any story should be a microcosm of the story’s main themes and issues. In the case of Mr. Robot, the first scene contains all the seeds of conflict which play out over the show’s four season-run.

Mr. Robot opens with a voice-over monologue narrated by Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) over the image of a shadowy penthouse boardroom in Manhattan. In this scene, Elliot speaks to the audience, breaking the fourth wall:

What I’m about to tell you is top secret. A conspiracy bigger than all of us. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The guys that play god without permission. And now I think they’re following me.

With this quick flash-forward to a higher threat (a visual paid off by the end of the episode, actually), the show establishes the stakes of the story from the get-go. Though Elliot is performing street-level hacks at the present moment, by the end of the season he’ll be trying to take down a multinational company, with implications for the fate of the global economy.

Whereas Mr. Robot’s opening seconds establishes the main conflict, the very next scene displays an excellent example of how to introduce your main character. After the corporate boardroom scene, the screen cuts to a scene of Elliot on the New York subway, from which he quickly flashes back to another scene, from the previous night, when he visits “Ron’s Coffee Shop” and confronts its owner, Rohit. The scene is a simple shot-reverse-shot between Elliot and Rohit, but it serves to establish Elliot’s MO as a hacker for justice and also reveal the vulnerabilities in his personality. Rohit is caught in the middle as they engage in social pleasantries despite the adversarial situation in which they both participate.

Elliot starts his speech innocuously, praising the WiFi speed of Rohit’s coffee chain, but quickly reveals his agenda:

I like coming here. Because your WiFi was fast. I mean you’re one of the few spots with a fiber connection and gigabit speed. It’s good. But so good it scratched that part of my mind, the part that doesn’t allow good to exist without condition, so I started intercepting all the traffic on your network. And that’s when I noticed something strange. And that’s when I decided to hack you.

Once Elliot mentions that the WiFi speed had “scratched” a part of his mind, we know that something is amiss. As we discover later, Elliot is a pessimist who is disillusioned with twenty-first century neoliberal society. Throughout the series, he does not believe “good can exist without condition.” The dialogue also foreshadows the main plot reveal of Season One of Mr. Robot, that Elliot’s mind is not totally present, and he actually has a split personality between himself and Mr. Robot, the hacker leader played by Christian Slater (à la the Tyler Durden plot twist in Fight Club).

So not only is Mr. Robot engaging with these elaborate foreshadowings of the rest of the show, we also have a “hack of the week” mentality with this scene. Elliot reveals that he discovered that Rohit’s servers secretly harbor a child porn database called “Plato’s Boys.” When Rohit threatens to call the police, Elliot emphasizes that he has the upper hand because he controls Rohit’s database and could get Rohit arrested. But then the scene takes another turn when Elliot uses the moment to reveal the cracks in his personality:

ELLIOT

I understand what it’s like to be different. I’m very different, too. I mean, I don’t jerk off to little kids, but… I don’t know how to talk to people. My dad was the only one I could talk to… but he died.

ROHIT

Sorry to hear that. How did he pass, may I ask?

ELLIOT

Leukemia. Dad definitely got it from radiation at the company he worked at, though I couldn’t prove it. Now he’s dead. Company’s fine though. … See I usually do this kind of thing from my computer, but this time I wanted to do it 1. In Person. Trying to work on my social anxiety.

In this bizarre exchange, Elliot elicits sympathy, real or calculated, on the part of Rohit. Technically, Elliot probably shouldn’t be giving these personal details out to a guy he just caught running a child porn ring. But Elliot’s a bit off—he views this as an opportunity to “work on his social anxiety.” This tells the audience that though Elliot is confident in this scene and showcases his skill at hacking, his confidence is a façade, and one that will crack completely by the end of the season. But the story he tells also happens to be his defining backstory, his “ghost.” His goal to take down “Evil Corp,” the company where his dad worked, comes from the fact that his dad was killed by the company’s negligence (and why the figure of Mr. Robot comes in the guise of his father (also played by Christian Slater).

There is an added layer in the subtext of the scene, however, in that the scene also foreshadows the real ghost of the series, revealed in Season Four—that Elliot’s father sexually abused him when he was a child, and part of the reason his mind created split personalities was as a defense mechanism. So the topic of “Plato’s Boys” adds another layer. (It’s unclear how much Esmail had planned of the show from the beginning, but this kernel of backstory seems to be consistent throughout the entire run).  

In its best moments (Season One in particular) Mr. Robot is a terrific guidebook on how to tell an action-packed thriller with global consequences and deeply human characters. Though Sam Esmail’s more recent efforts (such as Prime’s Homecoming) have emphasized style over story, one hopes that his career continues at the breakneck pace from which it stormed onto the scene with Mr. Robot’s opening season in 2015.

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Works Cited

Sam Esmail (showrunner). Mr. Robot, Season 1, Episode 1: eps1.0_hellofriend.mov (USA Network, 2015).

This is the ninth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the classic novel that more or less invented science fiction—and the book’s curious, often-forgotten obsession with glaciers and polar exploration.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Somewhat surprisingly, Frankenstein features an oft-forgotten polar exploration frame story: Polar explorer Captain Robert Walton writes some letters back to his sister explaining his encounters with both Dr. Frankenstein and Frankenstein’s monster, forming the “source” of the book’s more famous narrative. But in addition to the theme of Walton’s explorations, I also want to unpack another arresting “polar” element of this novel: the pivotal scene at the Alpine glacier, where Victor Frankenstein encounters his creation. The glacier as a metaphorical element is used here to great effect—as well as how to chart a character’s several emotional changes—in this text, in reaction to a glacier.

The letters of the explorer Walton served as Shelley’s mouthpiece for broadcasting the Romantic tone that her novel will eventually undercut with its Gothic plotline, setting up the way Frankenstein’s Romantic illusions are ruptured by the consequences of his experimenting on the boundary of natural experience. Describing the root of his passion for exploration, Walton writes to his sister Margaret:

I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets. There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious—painstaking;—a workman to execute with perseverance and labour;—but besides this, there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore. (Shelley 18)

Here, Walton describes an attraction to the “dangerous mysteries of the ocean” which spurs his efforts to go into the unknown and to take the path less traveled. As an archetypal Romantic explorer, he is entranced by the sublime of undiscovered lands despite the danger such journeys might entail. In a bit of foreshadowing, Walton expresses his admiration of a (then-) “modern poet” whom he previously identified in the passage as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, regarding “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” This strikes me as a strange poem to adore if you are an explorer, considering the Ancient Mariner’s fate as leading a cursed expedition and his doom in being forced to tell his tale forevermore. But it does make sense as a foreshadowing of Walton’s fate, being the one who ends up being burdened with telling Frankenstein’s story (and that of his monster).

This initial Arctic prelude (and later, the epilogue), which features Walton encountering Frankenstein in the Arctic and Frankenstein relating his tale, serves as a thematic frame to give Frankenstein the quality of a ghost story told secondhand, mediated through several levels of storytelling. In a modern novel, we’d probably cut this whole frame, as it is not particularly essential to telling the story that Frankenstein most wants to tell. But in developing a Romantic figure such as Walton, it does set up how Shelley juxtaposes the invigorating nature of the sublime with the horrifying consequences of Frankenstein’s decisions.

Every time I read Frankenstein, which may be one of the few books I’ve returned to several times, I look forward to the sequence where Dr. Frankenstein goes hiking in the Alps and encounters the monster—and the monster speaks and tells his story of “growing up” in the wilderness without any guidance at all. Perhaps this section is more arresting because the cinematic cliché of Frankenstein’s monster—the green Boris Karloff numbskull who groans and lumbers around—is so unlike the novel’s erudite monster who calmly learns French as a stowaway in the French peasants’ home. 

Even so, Shelley displays great control for how she mediates her descriptions of the Alpine landscape with Victor Frankenstein’s wildly-varying emotionality. The dynamism of Frankenstein’s reactions to the landscape both invoke the “sublime” nature of Romanticism and the eerie danger that comes with it, a play on the theme of the referenced Coleridge poem. As Frankenstein wanders the Alpine landscape, grieving the death of his brother William (murdered by the monster), he expresses his solace in observing the glacier:

For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed—“Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion away from the joys of life.” (Shelley 87-88)

Frankenstein is awestruck by the Alpine landscape and even says he would be content if he died then and there. Yet even within the beautiful landscape lies paradoxes. Mont Blanc is “awful” in its majesty. It seems significant that the glacier is described at first as “the sea of ice” and then “uneven like the waves of a troubled sea,” drawing a lineage to our polar explorer Walton, and making Frankenstein something of an ocean explorer himself. (Though it is worth noting that the glacier Frankenstein is referring to, in France, is in fact known as “Mer de Glace,” so her metaphors are grounded in extant geographical toponyms). However, the jagged nature of the glacier also makes it perilous and “deep.”

But despite the subliminal “awfulness” of his surroundings, Frankenstein is liberated by the spectacular danger of his hike. He is joyous, perhaps suggesting how this danger-seeking drive by explorers is self-destructive. By framing the beauty with its accompanying danger, Shelley also sets up her turn back toward the darkness:

As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature, also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; rage and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt. (Shelley 88)

Through the monster’s “superhuman” speed, the arrival of the monster is immediately heralded as unnatural and terrifying. In this moment, only the “cold gale of the mountains” keeps Frankenstein afloat. The first thought Frankenstein has, as he processes the vision of the monster, is that he should fight the monster to the death. The monster is “unearthly” and in Frankenstein’s view, only deserving of contempt. This reaction is important for two reasons. One, it helps set up the monster’s rejection by the French peasants in his “tale,” by proving how ugly he appears to everyone he meets, even the man who built him. Two, it also pulls Frankenstein out of his Romantic frenzy and rapidly causes him to experience fear, thoughts of violence, and eventually, express hatred and cruelty (in that order). The dynamism of this scene is striking, and how quickly Shelley is able to guide us through Frankenstein’s vacillating emotions.

But there are other ways in which glaciers retain metaphorical significance. A glacier is a frozen river that contains ice, which, if properly analyzed by modern scientists, can uncover the secrets of past atmospheric conditions. While Shelley would not have anticipated the possibilities of climate-adjacent ice core research, in 1818 she was probably somewhat aware of the research contemporaneously being done by scientists in the Alps; some of the successors of these scientists, such as Louis Agassiz and Arnold Guyot, who conducted research on Swiss glaciers in the 1830s, helped prove the existence of the Pleistocene ice age, which in turn helped usher in a scientific revolution that proved the earth was much older than previously suspected, eventually paving the way for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Glaciers are where secrets come out, and this is an element that has survived the two centuries since Frankenstein’s initial publication; Romantic meaning in the 1800s has given way to a repeated scientific significance, one of the many reasons for Frankenstein’s enduring appeal.

Now glaciers are disappearing across the world, which means their secrets are being lost. In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to visit Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, and I felt overwhelmed with sadness at the sight, and yet also felt joy in their presence. Most of the “charismatic” glaciers of that bay (the ones that crackle dramatically as they calve) are essentially gone, and it won’t be long before they all melt. Thus I believe Shelley accurately depicts the fluidity of strange emotions possible in the presence of alien landscapes such as glaciers, a vital observation in a time in which such landscapes are disappearing.

Works Cited

“Mer de Glace,” Wikipedia, January 22, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mer_de_Glace

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2003).

This is the eighth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel of suspense, The Secret History (Knopf, 1992). I spoil a lot of the book, so I’d try to read this gem before browsing this post.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell” (Tartt 4). So ends the in medias res prologue of The Secret History on a tantalizing note.

Though a fictional “mystery” story, from the beginning we know who was killed and who did it. As a result, The Secret History is often known as a “whydunnit” as opposed to a “whodunnit.” And yet The Secret History is more than that. It’s also a coming-of-age novel with elements that seem torn from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. However, this story is a product of the 1990s: Richard Papen is the very literary narrator who transfers to liberal arts Hampden College and falls in with a clique of eccentric classics students. After the group accidentally kills a farmer while trying to summon the god Pan for a pagan orgy (let’s just skate over that idea), their classmate Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, who was not invited to this event, blackmails the group and particularly its wealthy Machiavellian ringleader, Henry. So, they do what any slightly sociopathic group of classics students might do: they murder Bunny by pushing him off a cliff.

With the authorities on their tail, the second half of the novel becomes a suspense noir or Hitchcockian thriller like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dial M for Murder, or Rope, as they try to evade suspicion amidst their deteriorating mental states. In added complication, darker secrets come to the fore, like the incest of the twin characters, Charles and Camilla. And yet, though the novel climaxes with Henry taking his own life (and the fall) for the affair, the main cast of Richard, Francis, Charles, and Camilla basically get away with murder, though their lives are forever tarnished in the aftermath.

Perhaps it’s the blend of classic genre stories that lends The Secret History its appeal, an element heightened by the way the characters dress formally at school to evoke the class and status of characters in a Patricia Highsmith or Fitzgerald novel. Lacking cellphones or other modern devices (aside from Xerox machines), the novel achieves a timeless quality that gives it a gravitas that is hard to shake.

However, when I first read the novel in high school, I was maddened by the ending. Why did we need the random incest plotline? How could a novel invoke genre conventions (such as hardboiled detectives on the main character’s tail) and then drop them so casually by the end? Mostly I think I was frustrated that the characters were not caught, that the wheels of justice failed, that a noir declined to show its characters punished. Now I think more fondly of this decision. The characters are punished, but in a different way. Like in the Greek tragedy cycle The Oresteia, the protagonists are technically bailed out by a deus ex machina, but they still suffer their own consequences, in time. (The incest plotline of course seems very intentional in drawing parallels to Greek tragedy). I think, like the aforementioned “classic” novels in this genre, that this is a book that benefits from re-reading and re-examining, one where it’s easier to see how ingenious the plot and arcs are constructed from afar than when you’re in the thick of it.

Fundamentally, though, for people of a certain background, The Secret History is also relatable as a coming-of-age college story, particularly to former liberal arts students at pretentious Northeastern colleges. While not everyone takes courses in ancient Greek, most students who travel away for college encounter the experience of trying to make friends, and sometimes breaking into, established cliques. Richard Papen’s slow-but-surely ingratiation into the Greek class’ friend group in the first couple acts of the book is thus an alluring narrative to many readers (perhaps also accounting for why the Harry Potter books are so popular, because they depict a time when strong friendships are formed among initial strangers):

His students… were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated…. studied or not, I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, this was the way I might learn them. (Tartt 31)

Here, Richard’s interiority depicts the seductive allure of joining the Greek clique at Hamden, a desire that causes him to make the devil’s bargain of dropping all of his other classes and becoming the pupil of the enigmatic Julian in every subject. Who (at least if in high school or early college) has not wanted to become a member of a select, “cool,” group of individuals? Tartt is using this near-universal desire to help the reader buy into the romance that Papen is himself buying into. Tartt’s interiority spells out Richard’s attraction to this group, a strategy that I could use more often in my own work, which tends to rely on spare images and dialogue to convey decision-making.

Richard’s buy-in to the group is critical for the book to succeed because this “special” group of people, despite their apparent cultivation, is toxic on every level of the building. The most toxic member is Bunny Corcoran, whose villainy is depicted in both scene and in summary, and in scenes told by other characters in dialogue-flashback. Like Robert Cohn, who exacerbates all the interpersonal problems in The Sun Also Rises, Bunny is the goat who drives the characters to their worst. When Richard first has lunch with Bunny and Bunny shafts him with the check (which Richard cannot afford), Henry’s decision to bail them out and his confrontation with Richard about Bunny’s pattern of behavior helps illuminate, on so many levels, the extent and replicability of Bunny’s grifts:

“He told you he was taking you out. Didn’t he?” [Henry asked].

[…] “Well, yes,” I said.

“And just happened to leave his wallet at home?”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” Henry snapped. “It’s a terrible trick. How were you to know? He takes it on faith that whoever he’s with can produce tremendous sums at a moment’s notice. He never thinks about these things, how awkward it is for everyone….” (Tartt 61)

This exchange highlights the main problem with how the characters handle Bunny—though they are aware that he is a snob and serial con artist, they continue to tolerate and enable his behavior. The fact Bunny and Henry are still “friends” despite this tacit acknowledgement of his pathology, belies the cancer at the heart of the group, that because of social conventions Henry can’t shake off his freshman-year roommate. But Tartt’s ability to depict Bunny’s evolving and deteriorating relationship to the group is multifaceted, and goes beyond mere scene-storytelling. She deftly tells scenes through Henry’s dialogue as a flashback, such as when Henry recounts to Richard what transpired between him and Bunny in Rome:

“I’d hit [Bunny] harder than I meant to. His mouth fell open. My hand had left a big white mark across his cheek. All of a sudden the blood rushed back into it, bright red. He began to shout at me, cursing, quite hysterical, throwing wild punches at me…. I grabbed the diary and the translation and threw them in the stove—Bunny went for them, but I held him back until they started to go up—and then I yelled for whoever it was to come in. It was the chambermaid. She flew into the room, screaming in Italian so fast I couldn’t understand a word she said. At first I thought she was angry about the noise. Then I understood it wasn’t it at all. She’d known I was ill; there’d been hardly a sound from the room for days and then, she said excitedly, she’d heard all the screaming; she had thought I’d died in the night, perhaps, and the other young signor had found me, but as I was standing now in front of her, that was obviously not the case; did I need a doctor? An ambulance? Bicarbonato di soda?” (Tartt 191)

Even in this single paragraph, Tartt has achieved several impressive things. One, there’s a complete story in this apssage, full of several reversals and surprises (the slap, the destruction of the diary, the maid arriving, the maid’s unexpected reaction). This is also Henry telling us the story in dialogue, which is certainly an artifice—how many college students speak in semicolons?—but it works, and we forgive it, because it is so well-written, as immediate and vivid as a scene taking place in the narrative at present, rather than a murkier flashback. I wonder if this scene was originally written as a scene, and whether in revision she was asked to frame it like this. Whatever the rationality, I think it works, despite itself.

And yet Tartt also knows when to speed up the memories of Bunny, such as when Richard explains the gathering antipathy he harbored for the character:

By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: “Gorgeous necktie,” he’d say, “that’s a Hermès, isn’t it?”—and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie’s humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: “Richard, old man, why don’t you keep any pictures of your folks around?” (Tartt 219)

This example of Richard speaking in summary evokes several specific moments in the style of montage. It presumes the passage of time while adding enough specific instances to add authenticity to Richard’s emotions. Tartt faces a tricky task—she has to depict the group’s decision to kill Bunny as both entirely justified (in their minds) and entirely damning (in actuality). This central challenge feels tied to classical tragedy. Just as Elektra and Orestes are technically justified in murdering their mother (who herself murdered their father), the Greek siblings are still committing murder themselves. There is no solace in their action, but the evidence for their decision must be rooted in the text. For Tartt, this evidence comes from in-scene memories, patterns of behavior, eclectic slights that have accumulated, and an Italian flashback sequence that reads as if it is coming to cinematic life on the page. The variety keeps the novel on-balance and effective.

All this tension builds to the astonishing moment when the group pushes Bunny off the cliff halfway through the book:

Everything was very still. From somewhere far away, in the woods, I heard the faint, inane laughter of a woodpecker.

“Tell me,” Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note of suspicion. “Just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?”

The woods were silent, not a sound.

Henry smiled. “Why, looking for new ferns,” he said, and took a step towards him. (Tartt 269)

Fade to black, section break. The quietness of the scene, and the restraint of the moment, adds to its effectiveness. The rest of the novel unspools from there, as the evade questioning by the detectives, confront the overbearing power of guilt at Bunny’s funeral, and descend into melodrama as the twins’ incest is revealed.

It’s all effective; unsatisfying on the first read but, when you read something the second time, you understand the ending and the logic Tartt is building towards. This re-framing of the inevitability in the reader’s mind that comes with the second read, renders the book more powerful and poignant.

As a result I’ve learned to forgive the excesses of the second half of The Secret History. On the first read I was baffled by the coda, in which Richard meets Henry in a dream-space reminiscent of Hell, as tacky and unearned. But in that scene Richard says:

“I looked at [Henry]. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn’t time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point” (Tartt 559).

It is beside the point! All the critiques of this book fail at some level, because, well, Donna Tartt wrote a perfect book here, a classic that evokes classics, 20th century and ancient, in combination with a coming-of-age college tale and noir. At least, these are all things I like, so it worked for me.

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Works Cited

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History (Vintage Contemporaries: New York, 1992).

This is the seventh chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells’ bestselling nonfiction portrait of what the world will look like in the next century after global warming’s effects become (even more) apparent.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” opens David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 climate polemic, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, its first salvos dark and ominous, as you might expect from a book in this genre. And yet, the New York magazine writer’s compact volume, written in the environmental tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, is a strange text. Framed around a “kaleidoscopic” series of portraits of projected climate changes in various categories (e.g., “Heat Death,” “Hunger,” “Drowning,” etc.), the book eventually pivots to a series of essays about potential responses or tangent subjects related to this discussion (“Storytelling,” “Politics of Consumption,” etc.).

What is most interesting about Wallace-Wells’ approach is that he is careful to strike a tone that is cautiously optimistic. In this way he seems aware that being too dour will lead to his message being dismissed, and that cautious optimism is the only way we can find a path out of this mess. I am also intrigued by the way Wallace-Wells incorporates often passed-over factoids about our climate future, a technique I’ve tried to pursue in my own work.

In the book’s earliest pages, Wallace-Wells curiously paints his own credibility as a pragmatist who isn’t much wedded to one ideology or another:

I am not an environmentalist, and don’t even think of myself as a nature person… I’m not about to personally slaughter a cow to eat a hamburger, but I’m also not about to go vegan. I tend to think when you’re at the top of the food chain it’s okay to flaunt it, because I don’t see anything complicated about drawing a moral boundary between us and other animals, and in fact find it offensive to women and people of color that all of a sudden there’s talk of extending human-rights-like legal protections to chimps, apes, and octopuses, just a generation or two after we finally broke the white-male monopoly on legal personhood. In these ways—many of them, at least—I am like every other American who has spent their life fatally complacent, and willfully deluded, about climate change… (7)

Wallace-Wells takes an interesting approach by outlining why he is not the typical voice of a book in this genre. He is not an environmentalist, he is not a vegan, and he jokes about the animal rights movement and its policy against “speciesism,” the theoretical act of discriminating against other animal species. This makes him more accessible to the intellectual book-buying crowd for whom he’s writing. Unlike doom-and-gloom activists like Bill McKibben, Wallace-Wells is clearly not a martyr for the climate cause, and I think that builds rather than erodes his credibility. Meanwhile, Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio have often failed in their climate messaging attempts because they are political and Hollywood figures, and their relatively lavish lifestyles stain their advocacy with hypocrisy. Wallace-Wells is clearly upper-middle class, and thereby similar in experience to many of his targeted, Condé Nast-subscribing readers.

Wallace-Wells also avoids accusations of hypocrisy by running right into them. “As it happens, I did have a child, Rocca,” he writes. “Part of that choice was delusion, that same willful blindness: I know there are climate horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children” (32). He sidesteps the potential guilt he has created for bringing yet another human life into the world-in-collapse by cautioning that “those horrors are not yet scripted”:

We are staging them by inaction, and by action can stop them….The fight is, definitively, not yet lost—in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less. (32)

Wallace-Wells cautions that the future described is not yet set in stone and that our action could alleviate its predictions somewhat; meanwhile he is less concerned about preserving the status quo but merely preserving humanity’s presence, a much more realistic goal, since the climate on Earth has been changing for millions of years with and without our Carbon contribution. And then, even more provocatively he turns further from the horror, suggesting that he is not terribly worried for his daughter Rocca, but also “excited” for what she will experience:

And I have to admit, I am also excited, for everything that Rocca and her sisters and brothers will see, will witness, will do. She will hit her child-rearing years around 2050, when we could have climate refugees in the many tens of millions; she will be entering old age at the close of the century, the end-stage bookmark on all of our projections for warming. In between, she will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat, and the people of her generation making a future for themselves, and the generations they bring into being, on this planet. And she won’t just be watching it, she will be living it—quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending. (32)

Essentially, Wallace-Wells expresses solace that his daughter will live in “interesting times.” (Meanwhile, I am not exactly happy about living through the battle for the continued existence of the American republic, yet here we are.) Wallace-Wells’ cautious optimism—while sweet, I guess—for his daughter’s future still detracts from the fact that he and everyone else are still putting the onus of saving the world on his daughter’s generation and the generation that follows that one. It is an interesting rhetorical choice, however, and again one that probably resonates more with readers than the doom-and-gloom route. People don’t always listen to negative prophets. A sympathetic voice who has faced and made similar decisions to the audience at large might just resonate more.

The other aspect that Wallace-Wells invokes to mostly success is his emphasis on select matters of climate change that don’t get much play on cable news or major newspapers. Wallace-Wells notes that often in climate reporting “the discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow, limited almost invariably to the matter of sea-level rise” (9). Too often sea-level rise is invoked as shorthand for what is in fact a “kaleidoscope” of climate changes. As a result the idea becomes abstract and loses meaning. Adding further to the problem is that “sea-level rise is different” from other climate effects, in that of all climate effects, it is the hardest to model with precision (64):

Because on top of the basic mystery of human response it layers much more epistemological ignorance than governs any other aspect of climate change science, save perhaps the cloud formation… but the breaking-up of ice represents almost an entirely new physics, never before understood in human history, and therefore only poorly understood (64).

Of course, sea level rises will be dramatic, but it remains unclear how fast it will happen. Wallace-Wells adds that, “It may take centuries, [a scientist] says, even millennia, but he estimates that ultimately, even at just three degrees of warming, sea-level rise will be at least fifty meters…” (68). Fifty meters is a lot, but it will take time.

One of the more important arguments of Wallace-Wells’ book is how he recognizes that the onus of environmental responsibility, culturally, has often rested with the consumption of individuals, which is misleading, particularly when it comes to freshwater usage:

But accusations of individual responsibility were a kind of weaponized red herring, as they often are in communities reckoning with the onset of climate pain. We frequently choose to obsess over personal consumption, in part because it is within our control and in part as a very contemporary form of virtue signaling. When it comes to freshwater, the bigger picture is this: personal consumption amounts to such a thin sliver that only in the most extreme droughts can it even make a difference. (90)

Ultimately, as Wallace-Wells explains, corporations, agriculture, and industry consume the vast majority of freshwater resources, and the shift to personal responsibility is a way to deflect the onus onto the individual. Thus the only way to really affect change is to lobby for legislation that will constrain the consumption of these institutions. This, ironically, is more palatable to a wide audience than preaching a lifestyle of absolute asceticism. However, it must be said that striving for a net-zero Carbon lifestyle is probably a good idea, but Wallace-Wells refrains from such advocacy, which is an interesting choice.

But the message that stuck with me the most from The Uninhabitable Earth was that we can’t give up. Accepting inevitability encourages the very complacence for which Wallace-Wells confesses for himself. As he states:

The next decades are not yet determined. A new timer begins with every birth, measuring how much more damage will be done to the planet and the life the child will live on it. The horizons are just as open to us, however foreclosed and foreordained they may seem. But we close them off when we say anything about the future being inevitable. (135)

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Works Cited

Cho, Renee. “Recycling in the U.S. Is Broken. How Do We Fix It?” State of the Planet, Earth Institute, Columbia University, March 13, 2020. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books: New York, 2019).

This is the sixth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with the greatest fish-tale of them all—Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, beloved by many, and yet resented by so many more middle schoolers forced to, um, “plumb the depths” for the elusive white whale. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist!)

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

Let’s get this out of the way—Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick follows an intellectual known as “Ishmael” as he joins the voyage of the Pequod, where he bears witness Captain Ahab’s mad quest to kill the eponymous white whale.

While that sounds like fine groundwork for a seafaring adventure novel, Melville’s narrative structure significantly deviates from what might have been a more conventional fish story. In this post, I’ll consider the novel’s overzealous front matter, the various narrative styles depicted, and the book’s self-conscious haphazard organization of material. By considering the classic doorstop through these lenses, we can see that Moby-Dick is both an example of what to do and what not to do in terms of writing an adventure novel.

Epigraphs: The quotes at the beginning

If we start from the beginning—the very beginning—let’s talk about Moby-Dick’s absolutely insane epigraph. Usually, epigraphs are included in the front matter to signal the book’s themes. To name a prominent adventure example, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park opens with two lines from Linnaeus and Chargaff. In particular, the Linnaeus quote sums up the theme of the novel:

Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them (viii).

In such a short space, Crichton’s quote is pulling double-duty by addressing how dinosaurs are “terrible lizards” and hitting on the book’s theme as a cautionary creation story.

As for Melville’s book, it opens with two sections of front matter, and while they strive to give the reader a sense of what to expect, they are much less efficient in meeting that objective. The first section of front matter is a note on “Etymology,” which provides several dictionary definitions of whales, and then translations of the term in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch, “Feegee” (Fiji), etc. (xxxiv-xxxviii). To a modern reader, this seems innocuous enough, given that this section is only a page-and-a-half.

But then there are the “Extracts”—a collection of about 80 quotes related to whales from a variety of sources, including the Bible, Pliny, Jefferson, and more obscure, possibly fictional sources, such as what is referred to as “‘Something’ unpublished” (xl-li). These extracts tend toward a portentous tone, characterizing whales as a malevolent force observed throughout the ages, such as in Lord Bacon’s Version of the Psalms: “The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan” (xli).

But the front matter’s is attributed to a “Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School” and a “Sub-Sub-Librarian”—contradicting the ominous sentiment (xxiv, xl). Rather, these offbeat descriptions of authorship veer on parody.

Was Melville attempting to suggest his book was not just a whaling adventure, but a self-aware fish story? Even if that was his intention, he certainly could have accomplished the same goal more efficiently, with two quotes instead of eighty. But without the advantage of Google, perhaps he thought he was doing his readers a favor with all the pre-text trivia.

Narrative styles: An exercise in “variety”

Melville’s narrator Ishmael seems to take on several different prose styles, of which I discuss two here: his Emersonian efforts in “The Whiteness of the Whale” and his satirical amateur natural scientist persona which appears throughout the book. In Emersonian fashion, Ishmael conflates the problem of the whale’s whiteness with that of the soul:

But not have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul… and yet it should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind (211-212).

The melodrama of Ishmael’s whiteness contemplation takes up eight pages, which is quite a long time to riff on an extended metaphor (204-212). Melville spends far more time in the voice of an amateur natural scientist. In at least three extensive chapters, the narrator introduces the reader to his interpretation of the taxonomy of whales in “Cetology,” “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” “Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales” (145-157, 285-289, 290-293). We know that Melville is indeed familiar with Cuvier, Linnaeus and Agassiz since he directly references their style of tedious, gentlemanly scholarship in the text (146-148, 334). He even proposes to be an earth scientist, though clearly satirically:

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts (497).

Since the geology of the era resembled more of a gentleman’s hobby than a modern discipline, Melville seems to be poking fun of wealthy aristocrats interested in geology, their only expertise in that they had held a shovel before. In keeping with the amateur confidence of contemporary natural scientists, at one point Ishmael dares to propose his own hypothesis on whale spouts: “the spout is nothing but mist,” a conclusion he reaches not from scientific certitude but “by considerations touching the great dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale” (409). Shallow evidence, ego, and inconsistent logic appear to be Melville’s targets with his cetological prose—unless he really just wanted to express his views on whale anatomy.

(Lack of) organization

Melville’s organizational approach is more haphazard. His narrator often flags background whale trivia as necessary to understanding upcoming whale-chase action sequences:

With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale line (60).

Often, the information is presented ahead of these action sequences, but on several occasions the background introduced retroactively explains necessary elements. “Chapter 62: The Dart” explains an aspect of harpooning relevant to the chapter that preceded it, and “Chapter 70: The Sphynx” opens with the admission:

…it should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded (313, 338).

The explanatory chapters thus alternate between prospective set-up, and retroactive apologetic explanations. Through the guise of Ishmael, Melville even seems to defend (or lament) the fractal nature of his storytelling in “Chapter 63: The Crotch”1:

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters ( 315).

This line does not excuse the retroactive approach—there can be no foreshadowing if all the ominous details are given after the fact, limiting the suspense of Melville’s efforts. I disagree with the tactic, and would not use it for my own writing, unless we indulge in the possibility that Melville intended for his narrator to be interpreted as insane. Especially in later chapters, Ishmael makes several references to insanity:

So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought… (454)

Not long after, Ishmael describes the mad fervor he possesses when squeezing coagulated whale oil: “I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me” (456). He later admits to tattooing a skeleton of a sperm whale to his neck, while considering nothing odd of it (491-492).  

These details made me wonder whether Melville intended Ishmael to have the same arc as the narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire—revealed to be ever more delusional over the course of the novel.

All told, Melville’s text suggests there can be a place for incorporating different voices and various types of background information—especially when it supports the goals of suspense and theme—but there are many places where it should not be—as when it stops the novel in its tracks. His book might have been a more successful adventure yarn if the explanations were leaner, set up action, or were omitted entirely.

But, despite all that, I still really like Moby-Dick. Its messiness makes the text richer. Like how Herodotus’ more boring historical sections actually provide key ethnographic information about ancient Egypt to modern historians, Moby-Dick’s excessive detail transports us to a world where whale oil was the critical natural resource, the extraction of which moved the world—but at what cost? Certainly, that allegory is relevant to our present environmental, energy, and climate challenges.

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Works Cited

Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. Random House, New York, 1990.

Melville, Herman and Delbanco, Andrew (Introduction). Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale. Penguin Classics, New York. 1992.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. Vintage, New York, 1989.

This is the fifth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Richard Powers’ much-lauded novel The Overstory (W.W. Norton, 2018), winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

“If the trees of the earth could speak, what would they tell us?” reads the dust jacket description of Richard Powers’ The Overstory. This novel, which netted Powers the Pulitzer Prize, is a bit strange. I feel as if the book was mismarketed as a novel which told the story through the perspective of trees. It does not. Rather, it tells the interconnected story of nine individuals whom eventually cross paths (at least, most of the time, which I’ll get into); all their lives are either directly involved or somewhat adjacent to protecting a particular grove of California Redwoods. It feels more like Cloud Atlas, sans the Russian doll structure, and with a very simplistic, sentimental environmentalist message: trees are beautiful, and good. Okay, great. Yes, I’ve also read The Lorax. Still, the ecosystem is so much more complicated than in Powers’ sentimental description, and yet he constantly frames the Pacific Northwest biome as being under extreme threat (not from climate change) but by logging, a note that didn’t ring true compared to far more endangered rainforests—the Amazon, the Congo, and the jungles of Indonesia.

This goes without saying Richard Powers seems to occupy a conflicting spot in the literary universe. The only other Powers I have read, The Gold Bug Variations, I read at the behest of a family friend who considered that novel his favorite book of all time. The Gold Bug Variations is not my favorite novel of all time, as it is a rather tedious romance between a geneticist and musician across two timelines, one that tries to link Bach to genetics, and also Edgar Allen Poe and marketing. It doesn’t work.

However, The Overstory is certainly more effective than that earlier effort. Powers gets out of his own way to tell the stories of his characters, whose origins are often dramatic and intricate. Take the dazzling origins of Nicholas Hoel, a descendent of farmers who photographed a single tree on a farm every day for decades (“three-quarters of a century dances by in a five-second flip” (17), and that of Mimi Ma, a Silicon Valley computer scientist-turned-tree-activist descendant of a Chinese immigrant who brought a priceless heirloom across the ocean in the early 20th century. Then there’s the on-again, off-again romance between Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, whose courtship began during preparations for a local theater’s production of Macbeth (as you might expect, the Birnam Wood sequence figures prominently).

But there are a lot of characters, and not every character can be given a gorgeous origin. Some of the character’s plotlines are a bit distracting because their specificity is too close to real events. There’s Douglas Pavlicek, who not only participated in the notorious, real-life Stanford Prison Experiment but fought and was wounded in Vietnam (parachuting into a tree which saved his life). There’s Neelay Mehta, the paraplegic programmer who develops what is essentially the video game Civilization (who became paralyzed when he fell out of a tree as a child). (Are you sensing a pattern here with the tree-related injuries?)

Then there’s the case of Olivia Vandergriff, an out-of-control college girl, who, after being electrocuted and briefly dying before resuscitation, becomes touched by Redwoods and a vessel for the trees’ mission—that of fighting off loggers. As Vandergriff becomes a mouthpiece for the tree gods, she loses her edge as a compelling character. As her death (from falling out of a tree) is the pivot from which the story turns, her lack of humanity as basically a modern-day dryad weakens the punch of this critical moment.

The sheer quantity of characters leads to the book’s main problem—with so much at stake and in play, Powers resorts to the same strategies repeatedly to generate drama in each plotline, a pattern that does not deepen the novel, but rather expands its overwhelming cheesiness. Thus the ambitious design of The Overstory betrays the weak foundation at its roots.

Nearly all the characters are unbearable horny. Adam consistently lusts after his psychology advisor (he’s a teenage guy): “He wants to know whether she ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is—he wants to say robust” (256). This plotline goes nowhere; rather it’s just there to make a quiet moment somewhat more compelling. Meanwhile Pavlicek lusts after Mimi (uncomfortable, given the age difference), and Hoel gets obsessed with “divine” Olivia.

Moreover, nearly all the characters are subject to some unspeakable tragedy. Hoel’s entire family dies in a gas poisoning. Adam’s sister goes missing in Florida, presumably murdered by a serial killer. Mimi’s father suffers from Alzheimers’; Ray has a stroke after his turbulent wife has an inexplicable affair. Every character has enough drama for each to get their own book. The first time a tragedy unfolds, it has power (Hoel’s origin in particular) but the ninth time the tactic appears, it’s to greatly diminishing returns.

To make matters even more ridiculous, the tragedies are frequently aligned with an alarming amount of fatal or near-fatal tree-related accidents. Nearly every character crashes, falls out of, or is injured in some way by trees. In addition to the “tree accidents” I’ve already mentioned, at one point Nicholas Hoel crashes his car into a tree, and so does Dorothy Cazaly after reading a love note from Ray. I understand the book is about the trees, and the trees have some agency in this book as a supernatural force, but I was starting to roll my eyes every time a character was injured by a tree, since it happened so much and so often.

With such a large cast, one also expects the characters to eventually meet up. Not all of them do. Some characters don’t ever come into contact, and when they do, it often feels forced. Maybe it would have been better to keep them apart? Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, the wayward and stormy lovers, never encounter the main group, but Ray, post-stroke, watches the court case of Adam Appich on television. Mehta eventually attends a lecture by tree scientist Patricia Westerford, and so does Mimi. (I never for a second believed that Mimi Ma would become a tree activist and abandon her comfortable life in Silicon Valley). These gestures felt like vain attempts at tying off loose ends that had started out loose and never found their way. It was as if Powers was making this up as he went along, for the most part. Hoel and Appich might have been consolidated into one character, for example, as two young men of similar ages (who both fall, in different ways, for Olivia). Ray and Dorothy never figure into the main plot, and so they might be eliminated. The same goes for scientist Patricia Westerford, who ends up just providing evidence that the trees talk to each other and supports the novel’s insinuation that the trees are manipulating the humans, acting as the book’s mouthpiece for its shallow brand of environmental platitudes (“You asked me here to talk about home repair. We’re the ones who need repairing. Trees remember what we’ve forgotten. Every speculation must make room for another. Dying is life, too” (464). So there were definitely ways to streamline The Overstory. In a Hollywood adaptation, I would expect Ray to actually defend Appich in court for an Aaron Sorkin/Frank Capra finale.

In 2021, Netflix announced that they hired David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners of Game of Thrones, to develop The Overstory as a Netflix show. Good for Powers, if it eventually ends up being greenlit, though I do wonder how the writers will adjust the plotlines; undoubtedly the characters will cross paths more directly and consistently in their adaptation.

Powers’ book is undeniably well-written and for the most part enjoyable (apart from the eye-rolling flaws I’ve mentioned), and with the Pulitzer I wonder whether he’s been honored for a lifetime of contributions to letters as opposed to a singular work. The Overstory is not as innovative as its marketing might suggest, but it’s still solid. I wouldn’t rank it highly as climate fiction, because it is too reliant on 1970s environmental rhetoric, too easily spellbound by redwood forests which have been on this Earth (relatively) briefly and will inevitably fade with time, regardless of the logging economy in Oregon. Mostly, Powers teaches us that perhaps too much backstory is a bad thing, as an over-reliance on the same strategies becomes over-the-top and tiresome quite quickly. He does take a jab at Reno, though, just before Hoel and Olivia drive through Donner Pass, in a line that made me laugh quite a bit: “Nevada is wide and bleak enough to mock all human politics” (203). Come for the trees, then, and stay for the shade.

Works Cited

Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. (W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 2018).

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