Hi Donald--many thanks for sharing your experience with this new, Elizabeth Strout novel, which sounds a bit unfocused and even off-putting. Perhaps she is trying to do too much with a thin story and a cast of indistinct characters. Maybe she's trying to be too cute, when the well-established forms of narrative structure you so helpfully outlined actually serve the purposes of nearly any novelist. At least any one that I'm likely to read. As a reader, and in my own fiction, I have come to favor strong story told in an ongoing present tense with a limited-omniscient [3rd person] narrative that dips freely into indirect discourse providing readers with access to a character's thoughts and feelings, presenting them as if they're the character's own, and thereby creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy. But again--what story there is must be strong by which I mean engaging, i.e. "dramatic." John Updike's "Rabbit" novels and Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" novels perfectly exemplify what I'm saying.
Dear Don, I have to say first that I’ve found Strout’s reputation to far outweigh her achievements. Her writing seems pretentious in its sheer (fake?) modesty. How ordinary can we be, she seems to ask with a sneer, but then, having recognised that she seems to think she is writing about my own and other readers’ ordinary lives I always feel the need to have another quick look to see if she has revised her opinion. From your critique of her latest clearly the answer is no. However, I enjoyed your careful, unpretentious and apparently not fake revelation of her method, if it can be called so. Why should narrative structure not unfold in as random a way as in real life? Why impose pattern when ‘reality’ is ‘one damn thing after another’ and the repetition of design is only how we choose to order our thoughts?
I appreciate your reference to John Yorke’s book but see the ideas we might entertain after Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos et al can have a relevance today as Strout seems to show.
Thank you for encouraging me to rethink the point of structure. I shall go back and read her linked books in order (!)
Hi Donald--many thanks for sharing your experience with this new, Elizabeth Strout novel, which sounds a bit unfocused and even off-putting. Perhaps she is trying to do too much with a thin story and a cast of indistinct characters. Maybe she's trying to be too cute, when the well-established forms of narrative structure you so helpfully outlined actually serve the purposes of nearly any novelist. At least any one that I'm likely to read. As a reader, and in my own fiction, I have come to favor strong story told in an ongoing present tense with a limited-omniscient [3rd person] narrative that dips freely into indirect discourse providing readers with access to a character's thoughts and feelings, presenting them as if they're the character's own, and thereby creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy. But again--what story there is must be strong by which I mean engaging, i.e. "dramatic." John Updike's "Rabbit" novels and Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" novels perfectly exemplify what I'm saying.
Dear Don, I have to say first that I’ve found Strout’s reputation to far outweigh her achievements. Her writing seems pretentious in its sheer (fake?) modesty. How ordinary can we be, she seems to ask with a sneer, but then, having recognised that she seems to think she is writing about my own and other readers’ ordinary lives I always feel the need to have another quick look to see if she has revised her opinion. From your critique of her latest clearly the answer is no. However, I enjoyed your careful, unpretentious and apparently not fake revelation of her method, if it can be called so. Why should narrative structure not unfold in as random a way as in real life? Why impose pattern when ‘reality’ is ‘one damn thing after another’ and the repetition of design is only how we choose to order our thoughts?
I appreciate your reference to John Yorke’s book but see the ideas we might entertain after Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos et al can have a relevance today as Strout seems to show.
Thank you for encouraging me to rethink the point of structure. I shall go back and read her linked books in order (!)
CC