“She had been presented with one setback after another…”

Note: This post is the thirty-first installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 30. You can read the previous installments here.

Aside from a handful of striking exceptions, a novel is a linear form of storytelling, designed to be read in sequence from first page to last. Yet writers are irresistibly drawn to metaphors from the visual arts to describe what they do, in part because they naturally think in terms of the shape of the work as a whole. As readers, when we refer to a novel as a tapestry or a mosaic, it’s less about our experience of it in the moment than the impression it creates over time. This shape is impossible to describe, but when we’re finished with the story, we can sort of hold it in our heads, at least temporarily. It reminds me a little of Borges’s definition of the divine mind:

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconceivable figure. The divine mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

One of the pleasures of a perfectly constructed work of fiction is that it allows us to feel, however briefly, what it might be like to see life as a whole. And although the picture grows dim once we’ve put down the book and picked up another, we’re often left with a sense of the book as a complex shape that somehow exists all at once.

It’s tempting to divide books into groups based on the visual metaphors that come most readily to mind. There are stories that feel like a seamless piece of fabric, which may be the oldest analogy for fiction that we have: the words text and textile emerge from the same root. Other stories gain most of their power from the juxtaposition of individual pieces. They remind us of a mosaic, or, in modern terms, a movie assembled from many distinct pieces of film, so that the combination of two shots creates information that neither one had in isolation. The choice between one strategy or another is often a function of length or point of view. A short novel told with a single strong voice will often feel like a continuous whole, as The Great Gatsby does, while a story that shifts between perspectives and styles, like one of Faulkner’s novels, seems more like a collection of pieces. And it’s especially interesting when one mode blurs into the other. Ian McEwan’s Atonement begins as a model of seamless storytelling, with a diverse cast of characters united by a smooth narrative voice, but it abruptly switches to the juxtaposition strategy halfway through. And sometimes a mosaic can be rendered so finely that it comes back around to fabric again. In his review of Catch-22, which is essentially a series of comic juxtapositions, Norman Mailer observed: “It reminds one of a Jackson Pollock painting eight feet high, twenty feet long. Like yard goods, one could cut it anywhere.”

My own work can be neatly categorized by length: my short stories do their best to unfold as a continuous stream of action, while my novels proceed by the method of juxtaposition, intercutting between three or more stories. I’ve spoken before of how deeply influenced I’ve been by the book and movie of L.A. Confidential, which cut so beautifully between multiple protagonists, and I’ve followed that model almost to a fault. From a writer’s point of view, this approach offers clear advantages, as well as equally obvious pitfalls. Each subplot should be compelling in itself, but they all gain an additional level of interest by being set against the others, and the ability to cut between stories allows you to achieve effects of rhythm or contrast that would be hard to achieve with a single narrative thread. At the same time, there’s a danger that the structure of the overall story—with its logic of intercutting—will produce scenes that don’t justify their existence on their own. You can see both extremes on television shows with big ensemble casts. Mad Men handled those changes beautifully: within each episode’s overarching plot, there were numerous self-contained scenes that could have been presented in any order, and much of their fun and power emerged from Matthew Weiner’s arrangement of those vignettes. Conversely, on Game of Thrones, there are countless scenes that seem to be there solely to remind us that a certain character exists. The show grasps the grammar of intercutting, but not the language, and it’s no accident that many of its best episodes were the ones that focused exclusively on one location.

And I haven’t been immune to the hazards of multiple plots, or the way they can impose themselves on the logic of the story. When I read Chapter 30 of Eternal Empire, for instance, I have trouble remembering why it seemed necessary. Nothing much happens here: Wolfe interrogates a suspect, but gets no useful information, and you could lift out the entire chapter without affecting the rest of the plot whatsoever. It’s been a long time since I wrote it, but I have the uneasy feeling that I inserted a chapter here solely for structural reasons—I needed a pause in Maddy and Ilya’s stories, and Wolfe hadn’t had a scene for a while, so I had to give her something to do without advancing the story past the point where the other subplots had to be. (I can almost see myself with a stack of notecards, shuffling and rearranging them only to realize that I needed a chapter here to avoid upsetting the structure elsewhere.) I did my best to inject the scene with whatever interest I could, mostly by making the interrogation scene as amusing as possible, but frankly, it doesn’t work. In the end, the best thing I can say about this chapter is that it’s short, and if I had the chance to write this novel all over again, I’d either find a way to cut it or, more likely, revise it to advance the story in a more meaningful way. There’s nothing wrong with having a chapter serve as a pause in the action, and if nothing else, the next stretch of chapters is pretty strong. But as it stands, this is less a real chapter than a blank space created by the places where the other parts meet. And I wish I’d come up with a slightly better piece…

Malcolm in the Middle

Last week, the journalism blog Our Bad Media accused the author Malcolm Gladwell of lapses in reporting that it alleged fell just short of plagiarism. In multiple instances, Gladwell took details in his pieces for The New Yorker, without attribution, from sources that were the only possible places where such information could have been obtained. For instance, an anecdote about the construction of the Troy-Greenfield railroad was based closely an academic article by the historian John Sawyer, which isn’t readily available online, and which includes facts that appear nowhere else. Gladwell doesn’t mention Sawyer anywhere. And while it’s hard to make a case that any of this amounts to plagiarism in the strictest sense, it’s undeniably sloppy, as well as a disservice to readers who might want to learn more. In a statement responding to the allegations, New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote:

The issue is not really about Malcolm. And, to be clear, it isn’t about plagiarism. The issue is an ongoing editorial challenge known to writers and editors everywhere—to what extent should a piece of journalism, which doesn’t have the apparatus of academic footnotes, credit secondary sources? It’s an issue that can get complicated when there are many sources with overlapping information. There are cases where the details of an episode have passed into history and are widespread in the literature. There are cases that involve a unique source. We try to make judgments about source attribution with fairness and in good faith. But we don’t always get it right…We sometimes fall short, but our hope is always to give readers and sources the consideration they deserve.

Remnick’s response is interesting on a number of levels, but I’d like to focus on one aspect: the idea that after a certain point, details “have passed into history,” or, to quote Peter Canby, The New Yorker‘s own director of fact checking, a quote or idea can “escape its authorship” after it has been disseminated widely enough. In some cases, there’s no ambiguity over whether a fact has the status of public information; if we want to share a famous story about Immanuel Kant’s work habits, for instance, we don’t necessarily need to trace the quote back to where it first appeared. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have something like a quotation from a particular interview with a living person, which ought to be attributed to its original source, and which Gladwell has occasionally failed to do. And in the middle, we have a wild gray area of factual information that might be considered common property, but which has only appeared in a limited number of places. Evidently, there’s a threshold—or, if you like, a tipping point—at which a fact or quote has been cited enough to take on a life of its own, and the real question is when that moment takes place.

It’s especially complicated in genres like fiction and narrative nonfiction, which, as Remnick notes, lack the scholarly apparatus of more academic writing. A few years ago, Ian McEwan fell into an absurd controversy over details in Atonement that were largely derived from a memoir by the wartime nurse Lucilla Andrews. McEwan credits Andrews in his acknowledgments, and his use of such materials inspired a ringing defense from none other than Thomas Pynchon:

Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopedia, the Internet, until, with luck, at some point, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act—it is simply what we do.

You could argue, on a similar level, that assimilating information and presenting it in a readable form is simply what Gladwell does, too. Little if anything that Gladwell writes is based on original research; he’s a popularizer, and a brilliant one, who compiles ideas from other sources and presents them in an attractive package. The result shades into a form of creative writing, rather than straight journalism, and at that point, the attribution of sources indeed starts to feel like a judgment call.

But it also points to a limitation in the kind of writing that Gladwell does so well. As I’ve pointed out in my own discussion of the case of Jonah Lehrer, whose transgressions were significantly more troubling, there’s tremendous pressure on writers like Gladwell—a public figure and a brand name as much as a writer—to produce big ideas on a regular basis. At times, this leads him to spread himself a little too thin; a lot of his recent work consists of him reading a single book and delivering its insights with a Gladwellian twist. At his best, he adds real value as a synthesizer and interpreter, but he’s also been guilty of distorting the underlying material in his efforts to make it digestible. And a great deal of what makes his pieces so seductive lies in the fact that so much of the process has been erased: they come to us as seamless products, ready for a TED talk, that elide the messy work of consolidation and selection. If Gladwell was more open about his sources, he’d be more useful, but also less convincing. Which may be why the tension between disclosure and readability that Remnick describes is so problematic in his case. Gladwell really ought to show his work, but he’s made it this far precisely because he doesn’t.

Learning from the masters: Ian McEwan

If I were to recommend a single contemporary novelist as a good model for young writers to imitate, it would be Ian McEwan. Part of this is a matter of personal convenience: McEwan, in many ways, happens to represent the peak of the kind of writing toward which I’m constantly striving, and although I can’t come close to him at his best, I’d like to think of him as the platonic ideal of my own approach to fiction. (For the record, I only discovered McEwan after many elements of my own style were already locked in place; I never consciously emulated him, but I realized after the fact that he was better at what I was doing than I was.) Even if you’re writing in a different mode, there’s a lot that he can teach aspiring authors who are still trying to find their own voices. McEwan’s prose is stylish, elegant, but highly accessible: as T.S. Eliot said of Dante, if you imitate McEwan, you may end up with a boring sentence, but you won’t make a fool out of yourself. He understands the value of research, and he’s constantly expanding the range of experience about which he can credibly write. And while he’s not an intensely personal author, his books reflect a consistent set of questions to which he repeatedly returns—the nature of storytelling, the uneasy relationship between the body and the mind, and the contrast between the ideas by which we try to live and the messiness of human interaction.

He also loves plot, which gets close to the heart of why I find him so appealing. McEwan is a highly methodical writer, and his novels, even the seemingly loose series of events in Saturday, are intricately constructed. He’s an architect, not a gardener, but he’s also surprisingly humane and curious, which affords plenty of room for atmosphere and the careful exploration of character and situation as his stories proceed to their clockwork conclusions. In fact, as I’ve noted elsewhere, McEwan is essentially a suspense novelist who has been elevated into literary circles by virtue of sheer intelligence and craftsmanship. He understands that suspense is a tool designed to keep the reader engaged, and he uses that structure to carry us through complex novels of ideas that might not otherwise hold our attention. Suspense also provides him with a convenient matrix in which to tell stories about ordinary men and women placed in extraordinary situations, often involving violence, and to use the result to generate unexpected revelations of character. This is especially true of his earlier novels, like The Innocent, but you can see it all the way through his latest book, Sweet Tooth, which, among many other things, is a meditation on and subversion of the Cold War spy thriller. (Sharp readers will discern that the “David Cornwell” whom McEwan thanks in his acknowledgements is none other than John Le Carré.)

I just finished Sweet Tooth last week, and I think it’s his strongest work of any kind since Atonement. It may, in fact, be a better book overall, and much of it reads as a return—in a slightly lighter vein—to some of the themes and strategies of that earlier novel. Both Atonement and Sweet Tooth are founded on sustained acts of literary ventriloquism: Atonement moved easily between the perspectives of characters of a variety of ages, genders, and social classes, and Sweet Tooth is partially an exercise in inhabiting the mind and life of a young woman in London in the 1970s. Since I’ve written frequently from a female point of view, this kind of thing interests me greatly, and McEwan pulls it off in a fashion that is both impressive and slightly showy. The homely details are laid in with a degree of care that I’m not sure we’d see in a female novelist, and the entire time, we’re encouraged both to believe in Serena as a character and to marvel at McEwan’s virtuosity as a writer. In another book, this might be a serious flaw, and as much as I enjoyed Sweet Tooth throughout, I was always conscious of the stylistic feat it was performing, which wasn’t the case with Atonement. By the end, however, we realize that McEwan has been one step ahead of us the entire time, and in retrospect, the entire novel seems even more controlled and purposeful than we suspected.

That’s the mark of a great writer, and I’ll add one more quality to the mix: McEwan’s humanity. That may seem like an unlikely attribute for a writer whose early books tended to excessive darkness, and whose truest precursor may be the gleefully macabre short fiction of Roald Dahl. Like many of us, though, McEwan has become gentler with time, and instead of a failure of nerve, it reflects a progressively more sympathetic understanding of human life. Sweet Tooth gives McEwan the opportunity to revisit some of his own tricks with the benefit of an additional decade’s worth of experience, and within the confines of a genre that sometimes seems to have little more in mind than putting the reader through the wringer, his decisions—which I won’t spoil here—are immensely gratifying. There are ways in which the ending of Sweet Tooth doesn’t quite make sense, and it’s a little too ingenious for its own good. Still, it’s one that I’m happy to accept, both within the logic of the story and in the larger context of McEwan’s growth as an author. He’s so good at what he does that it’s easy to be jealous of him, but he’s also uncommonly generous at giving us the how as well as the what. This is what all fiction could be, if we had his patience, experience, and imagination, and if his most recent work is any indication, it’s only going to get better from here.

“At this hour of the morning, the prison was quiet…”

Note: This post is the ninth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 8. You can read the earlier installments here.)

There’s an unspoken assumption among many readers and critics that a good author should base his work entirely on personal experience, either derived from his own life or those of people he knows, and that it’s a sign of weakness to be overly dependent on research. If it’s clear that a writer has relied heavily on secondary sources to tell a story, or, worse, if the nature of those sources is readily detectable, it’s sometimes treated as a sort of lapse, even as an embarrassment. It’s generally agreed, for instance, that Tolstoy’s material on the Freemasons in War and Peace was based on his reading, not on firsthand information: he wasn’t a Mason himself, and other Masons wouldn’t be likely to share any details with him directly, so the scenes depicting Pierre’s initiation—which are believed to be fundamentally accurate—were derived from a handful of books. I’ve read critics who treat this as an objective flaw in an otherwise unimpeachable masterpiece, as if the knowledge that Tolstoy had to do a bit of research undermines our impression of him as an omniscient sage of the human world. And this flies in the face of the fact that all of War and Peace is a monumental work of research and construction, since it contains so much that Tolstoy never could have witnessed himself.

And this applies as much, if not more so, to contemporary authors. Ian McEwan, for example, based large sections of Atonement on the memoirs of Lucilla Andrews, who served as a nurse during the London blitz. McEwan wasn’t shy about giving credit to Andrews—he mentions her in his acknowledgments—but when a few readers pointed out how certain details in his novel seemed to be taken directly from her work, there was a mild outcry, with some even calling it a form of plagiarism. I doubt that anyone would have raised the issue if McEwan had conducted interviews with Andrews directly, but the revelation that parts of his story were transparently indebted to another book made some readers uncomfortable. The plagiarism charge was ridiculous, of course, as none other than Thomas Pynchon, a monster of research himself, made clear in an open letter to his publisher:

Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopedia, the Internet, until, with luck, at some point, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act—it is simply what we do.

Pynchon’s assessment of research as a kind of period of consolidation until “we can begin to make a few things of our own up” is absolutely correct, and library research is part of nearly every ambitious novelist’s bag of tricks. Research, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is less about factual accuracy than about providing the material for dreams, a gathering of “engaging details” that can furnish and feather the fictional nest we’ve created. (That last phrase is Anthony Lane’s, discussing Gustave Flaubert’s own voluminous research for Salammbo.) That’s true of literary as well as popular fiction: Saul Bellow had never been to Africa when he wrote Henderson the Rain King, but he was able to draw on travel accounts, textbooks, his own experience as a student of anthropology, and above all his own peerless imagination to create a remarkably convincing story, as even Norman Mailer admitted: “I don’t know if any other American writer has done Africa so well.” And it’s particularly indispensable for a novelist working in a field like suspense, where so much of the narrative necessarily deals with aspects of human life—murder, crime, conspiracy—that few writers have the luxury or desire to experience directly.

This was particularly true of City of Exiles, which I knew from the start would include long sequences set in the British prison system. I didn’t have any expectation of spending much time there myself, so I was forced to fall back on a handful of useful secondary sources: the memoirs of Charles Bronson, best known these days as the subject of a movie starring Tom Hardy, and especially the diaries of the suspense novelist Jeffrey Archer, who was sent to prison for perjury. We first see the result in Chapter 8, in which Powell and Wolfe pay a visit to Belmarsh to see the imprisoned gangster Vasylenko. Most of the details here, like the corridor that changes from lavender to green to blue as you enter a secure area, or the description of the interview room, walled with glass on all four sides like a fish tank, were taken from Archer’s book, and I draw on it repeatedly for all of the prison material that follows. I’m not sure if admitting this counts as a breach in the contract between an author and his readers—a suspense novelist, after all, is often expected to know something about everything—but I don’t see any harm in acknowledging my sources. Without their help, I wouldn’t have been able to write this novel at all. And we’re going to be spending a lot of time behind bars…

The pleasures and perils of research

When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

—Jonathan Franzen, to The Guardian

Recently, I’ve had research on the brain. Over the past month, which I’ve designated as a kind of free sandbox time for Midrash, I’ve read all or part of something like twenty books, along with many articles and old notes. On Sunday, I’m going on a very short trip to London, which means cramming a month’s worth of location research into less than a week. For the next few days, then, I’m going to be talking a bit about research—how a novelist does it, where it fits into the different stages of the writing process, and how to balance it with the other elements of storytelling. Today, though, I’ll be addressing a more general issue, which is whether deep research has any place in a novelist’s life at all.

As I see it, there are two main objections to research in fiction, only one of which can be easily dismissed. The first objection is that research is somehow alien to the true novelist’s art, either because fiction based on research is inherently less valuable than fiction drawn primarily from the author’s own experience, or because information itself is becoming increasingly worthless. The former argument is very old, but the latter has gained new resonance in the information age, as Franzen implies above. Information is everywhere. It’s a mouse click away. So it isn’t hard to conclude that the novelist’s traditional role as an investigator of reality is no longer relevant, or useful.

Franzen is right about one thing: voluminous research, in itself, is no longer enough to make a novel. But was it ever? The role of the novelist has never been simply to acquire facts and details: it’s to arrange those details into a previously unsuspected artistic pattern. If anything, this role is even more valuable these days, when our diet of information tends to consist of specific units of disposable data. The art of the novelist is to uncover order in apparent chaos, even if the ultimate goal is to undermine it. With so many facts at our disposal, but so little knowledge, we need that ordering function more than ever—especially because a novelist is one of the few remaining artists with no choice but to haunt libraries and read the books that nobody else reads.

As for whether research has a place in serious fiction, it’s only necessary to point out that research has served as an indispensable foundation of many great novels—including Franzen’s. Flaubert, the quintessential novelist, deeply researched all of his books. So did Tolstoy. More recently, works as distinct as Atonement and Gravity’s Rainbow have been masterpieces of research and structured imagination. It’s still true that, as Willa Cather said, the basic emotional material of a novelist is acquired by the age of fifteen. But if the novelist is looking for meaning outside his or her own range of experience—to explain “how the world works,” as Zadie Smith puts it—research is the necessary first step. The ordering, the pattern-making, will come later, but not without the raw material that creative research provides.

Which brings us to the second, more relevant objection to research, which is that it can be an excuse to put off the real work of writing. Research is a seductive pastime in itself, and because there’s always another book to read or location to visit, it can be all too easy for a writer to never actually begin the novel. Unlike the previous objection, this danger is very real. Later this week, I’ll be talking more about how to keep research in line with the rest of the writing process. For now, though, I’ll say this: research is not primarily about factual accuracy. It’s about acquiring material for dreams. Ultimately, it’s about freeing your mind to play the most serious game in the world. It’s true, from a factual perspective, that you can never have enough information. But before long, perhaps before you realize it, you’ll have more than enough material to play the game.

The joys of plot

The joy is in the surprise. It can be as small as a felicitous coupling of noun and adjective. Or a whole new scene, or the sudden emergence of an unplanned character who simply grows out of a phrase. Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure.

—Ian McEwan, to The Paris Review

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about plot—what it is, how to construct it, and why it matters. I’ve spoken to other aspiring writers about this, and have been dealing with it constantly while assembling an outline for the sequel to Kamera (which, now that the proposal has been officially accepted, I can finally say will be called Midrash). Over the next few days, I’ll be looking at plot from various angles, both in fiction and in film. Today, however, I want to talk about something more fundamental: the joy of plot from the perspective of the writer, who gets to play the greatest game in the world.

First, though, I want to address a major misconception. There’s a common assumption, reinforced by many critics and writing instructors, that plot is somehow inferior to other aspects of fiction, notably character and theme. (I’m not going to talk about language here, if only because language should, ideally, arise organically from those other three aspects.) And it’s true that a novel driven solely by plot can feel thin or unsatisfying. But here’s the important point: in nine cases out of ten, a novel driven solely by character and theme will, in the end, prove unsatisfying as well, if it’s published at all. A good novel needs all three legs of the tripod. And a strong plot, more than anything else, is what draws the reader along to the final page.

So why do so many critics—James Wood, for instance—tend to dismiss plot? It’s rather mysterious, but my sense is that those who undervalue plot are often those with the least experience of writing a novel themselves. Personally, I don’t think that any major novelist can dismiss plot. Or would want to. Because the construction of plot is one of the great joys and compensations of the writer’s life. Part instinct, part luck, part planning and preparation, it’s the most challenging thing that an artist can do: a process of intellectual engagement, drawing on all sides of the brain and personality, that can span months or years. It’s a game, but also deadly serious. And when it works, it’s something that no writer would willingly relinquish. As McEwan says:

A writer whose morning is going well, whose sentences are forming well, is experiencing a calm and private joy. This joy itself then liberates a richness of thought that can prompt new surprises. Writers crave these moments, these sessions….Nothing else—cheerful launch party, packed readings, positive reviews—will come near it for satisfaction.

And why is plot so satisfying for the writer? My guess is that it’s the aspect of writing that comes closest to capturing the deepest pleasures of craft. The writer begins with a handful of isolated pieces—a character, a location, an incident—and gradually moves outward. He thinks, dreams, and does research, casting his net as wide as possible, hoping that a chance conversation or a stray sentence in another book will set him off in another promising direction. Once he has amassed enough material, he looks for patterns, connections, affinities. He orders the pieces one way, thinks it over, and reorders them again. This process continues, in various forms, long after the actual writing has begun. And any writer who has really experienced it, even once, would never give it up, much less disallow it to others.

Here’s the big secret: writers value plot because it’s one of the few things that make their lives bearable. Writing is hard work. The simple act of putting words on the page can be torture. And, indeed, if a plot isn’t working—if it refuses to harmonize with the characters or become logically coherent—it can be torture as well. But when the pieces do finally fit, it can feel like magic. At best, there’s something mysterious about the result, as if the universe and the writer were conspiring in secret. Such moments may occur only two or three times in the course of a given novel, and not until after the hard work of research and preparation has been done, but once they fall into place, the writer would rather die than leave them unrealized. Plot, in short, serves the same purpose for writers as for readers: it reassures them that something good is around the corner. And it’s what carries them along to the end.

But none of this would matter if the writer’s joy weren’t also contagious. Reading a novel with a perfect plot—the first half of McEwan’s Atonement, for instance, before the story deliberately blows itself up—gives me, as a reader, an intense kind of pleasure, one that exists on two levels. The first is a shared pleasure at the skill of the author, who has created a vivid, interesting, elegant structure, a narrative house that can stand on its own. The second is rather simpler: it’s the primal, almost childlike satisfaction at seeing the promises of a story kept. Such satisfaction, as I see it, deserves to be ranked at the very height of the reasons we read, or write, fiction in the first place. Without it, and without plot, I don’t think we’d have novels at all.