Here at Vermont College  at this winter’s novel workshop, fourteen people sit in a bland, overheated room on sagging couches and give feedback on each student’s twenty-page submission. First the writer who is up must sink into silence. Each of eleven students says something positive about the pages. The faculty then provide their likes and appreciations.

Usually at this point there is a moment, a collective turning of the mind toward the critical. Yesterday I noticed in that moment it started to snow. With no particular order or organization, we discuss the things that don’t work. The writer remains silent, receptive, seething, hurting, laughing–it’s impossible to say. Most know how to keep their faces set in neutral. (I’ve only once been in a workshop, not here in Vermont, where the writer simply didn’t show on her day.)

My son goes to a high school that has workshops, spaces with high ceilings and very little heating and large old machines that do cool things like bend metal. In class certain techniques are demonstrated and then each student gets a turn at the machine.  My son likes workshop; he enjoys throwing his full weight onto a pedal or lever to get the machine to start moving. Recently, he came home with a shiny piece of something he’d twisted into a widening spiral and it remained on the kitchen table for days.

I tried to like workshop. I thought there were good workshops and not so good workshops, better writing, worse writing, better teachers, worse teachers. I wanted to be in a good workshop, with good students and good teachers. I wanted the people in my workshop to like my work, and give me feedback that would unlock the tight places, show me a way out. That’s what I hoped for this time around. But at the end of my first workshop day, during dinner, when everyone was asking everyone how they liked their workshops and everyone was smiling and saying yes, good, great, and the noise rose and fought the smell of cafeteria food, I found myself realizing, by saying it out loud, that I did not like workshop. The difference was that I meant it generally. Nothing to do with my particular winter workshop, which is filled with talented, hard working writers and talented, hard working instructors. I just don’t like workshop.

I don’t like getting feedback on the first twenty pages of the novel I’ve been working on for exactly two years now from people I don’t know who have nothing invested in me or my project, and I don’t like giving feedback to other students without knowing what drives them, what they are seeking to create, where their passions and pains lie, what they’ve struggled with. I don’t like giving or getting feedback when where the work is, what part of the process, has not been articulated, the destination unclear.  I don’t feel comfortable getting feedback from people I don’t trust, not because they are untrustworthy but because we have no history or larger context, no sustained connection. My responses cannot do justice to the work of others. It’s almost like I’m writing an anonymous comment on a blog post or noticing fresh graffiti on the house across the street.

Maybe if I could bring my novel pages to a room like one of the rooms in my son’s high school, put on large protective gloves and goggles, fire up a torch that emits sparks, I would like workshop better. I would be excited about it being my turn. I would listen and watch and lean on the lever. I would make something cool and bring it home and put it on the kitchen table. Is that possible?

This summer every Saturday I started going to the farmers market next to the freeway, an uninviting strip of pavement made lovely by stalls piled high with produce. At the time it was tomatoes, peaches, corn, greens, some I recognized, some I didn’t. I was trying to shop and cook more seasonally, so I bought what looked good and figured out meals when I got home. And one Saturday, the okra appeared, pointed corrugated pods of it, appealing in its raw, visual form. I’d eaten it a number of times in Indian restaurants and liked it well enough.

So I filled a bag with okra and when I got home, figured I would build an Indian meal around it. I cooked it two ways, one with onions and cumin, the other, tomato-based. My children, after the obligatory one bite, ate the naan instead of the okra. My husband, who eats and seems to like everything, said he liked the okra, but ate more sparingly than usual, with a lot of chutney on the side. I tried to like it, analyzing and criticizing the way I’d prepared it, the recipes, maybe it just needed more salt? A few weeks later, charmed once again by those dark green cones, I bought okra, tried cooking it southern-style. There was a lot leftover and because I hate to throw food away, I heated it for lunch and forked it into my mouth, choked it down, slimy, chunky, chewy okra.

My name is Karen and I do not like okra. My name is Karen and I do not like workshop.

You can cook it in a number of ways, you can cook it well, you can serve it to me in the friendliest of fashions. I do not like okra. Ditto for any traditional writing workshop I’ve ever participated in.

At residency, we have to attend eight lectures but can pick and choose; we can go to faculty and student readings when we want; informal conversations are optional. Everyone decides for different reasons. I try to balance poetry and fiction, see the lecturers I’ve loved in the past, attend readings when I am not so exhausted that I have to fall into bed. But we must attend every workshop, six in total, spread out over the ten days.

What would I be missing if I didn’t eat okra? Is okra, especially good for me–vitamins I couldn’t get in any other way? Will the okra feel hurt if I don’t eat it? Is it because okra is part of my culture, and that as a member of an okra-eating community, I have to eat it in order to retain my status? I can in fact answer these questions about okra (no, no, no) but I cannot answer them about workshop.

This afternoon, though, as I am walking along the snowy path toward that stuffy room, I imagine this. I am a dinner guest at a friend’s house, a friend who is a good friend, a friend whose invitation to dinner I was happy to accept, a friend who has cooked for years, who cares about food and prepares it well. If, when I am seated at the table and have served myself rice, chicken maybe, a sauce, I am passed another steaming dish, and it is okra, what would I do? Easy. Politely, I would eat the okra.

Vaclav Havel said that “hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

After a semester off from the MFA program, which I used, mainly in silence, to revise my novel, I am returning to Montpelier for the winter residency. As the day approaches, or rather the night since I’m flying on a red-eye through Newark, I am in the process of preparing myself on the surface and in those deeper places that require searching out and tending.

I’ve done my homework for workshop. I’ve read more novels by faculty. Yesterday, I finished rereading and tugging at my novel-in-progress, getting it into the best shape I currently can. I’ve written out my goals, for the program, for the novel, for the semester, and plan to ink them to the skin on the inside of my arm to glance at when I find myself drifting. I made a toffee-hazelnut-chocolate-candy-thing and packed it in a small tin to feed myself at those times when I am worn thin.

And still… as much as the words articulate, as much sound and meaning as they make, the current of silence continues, the silence of my heart beating when I’m not listening for it but trusting that it’s there, the silence of breath and memory and the way the path makes itself clear only as I walk it.

Find time for silence, I think. During residency, during the days of 2012 as I work on the novel, on poems, on listening to my kids and my husband and the others I love. It’s almost like I can hear it.

But sometimes something happens to awaken me to the feeling, either because I feel more alone (misunderstood, stereotyped) or, and this is the nice one, because I am surprised by like-mindedness about something essential to me.

To warm up for the writing morning, I indulged in my Paris Review interviews obsession and read the interview from 1986 with E.L. Doctorow. I loved what he had to say about his writing process and felt such kinship–someone gets me! I’m not alone!–that I’m sharing the link. I find myself pretty excited about most of the interviews I read there so I think all writers will enjoy this, but especially (perhaps) those who can relate to the “writing a novel is like driving on a country road in the dark” metaphor, and sometimes feel alone…

My novel is sore in the joints, my poems are exercises in futility, one line out of fifty a pleasure, so I decided to dedicate last night’s supper (three of us, a family of four, and two friends who’d left their kids at home) to spring. Edible poetry.

On the menu:

Prosecco with blood orange juice and Campari over ice

Garbanzos mashed with garlic, lemon, sea salt, drizzled in olive oil and covered with chopped mint

Hard salami and cucumber slices for the carnivorous

Olives

~~~~~

Penne with pancetta, asparagus, snap peas, snow peas, garlic, parsley and basil

Green salad and a super-tangy dressing (mustard, garlic, lemon, blood orange, etc)

~~~~~

Lemon chiffon cake, strawberries, and whipped cream out of the canister (and into the mouth, for some)

After dinner, my twelve-year-old daughter orchestrated a rowdy game of musical chairs. After making it to the final round, I lost to a four-year-old. Sometimes poems come out whole.

Here’s the deal: On Thursday afternoon I got my advisor’s response to the second packet (which consisted of 160 pp of the second part of my novel-in-progress). So far, she’s read all of the first part in a roughly second-draft form, and about ¾ of what I have written for the second part. She’s reading way more pages than she’s supposed to (way way way way way more) but this gives her the ability reply with global and specific feedback.

She raised some very interesting “large” concerns/questions about how the second part is structured and whether a  subplot is useful or not. When I first read her letter, and the day after, I felt extremely bummed out, like she didn’t like the book, or didn’t think I was good enough—all those voices yammering in my head. Yesterday, though, I began to think more practically.

Of course I want to think about her questions and seriously consider them. There are drawbacks to the way I’ve structured the second part, and I’d like to really consider how else I could structure it, or how I could revise it within the current structure to make it work better. But ultimately I need to make this sort of decision on my own.

What that process would look like for me: finishing Part II in the current structure.  Possibly finishing the whole novel. (Not sure about that.) Then taking a bit of a break, putting the manuscript away for a while before I read it with a somewhat distanced perspective. I find that with distance I can react like a reader, emotionally, intellectually, and that gives me a very good idea of what needs to change.

The problem with all this is that I currently see no way to do it within the framework of moving forward next semester with the MFA. When I applied to programs, I had it in my head that I would do a year, take time off, then do another year.  Last semester, that didn’t seem to make sense because I was able to deal with the feedback–which was much less global–, the decisions I needed to make, and continue to progress. At winter residency I was so energized by the lectures, my workshop, the advisor I got, all the interactions with other students, I decided to power through, do the program in two years, get done.

But now I’m changing my mind, and it’s ironically because of the generosity of my current advisor. Maybe I should take the time off? I don’t know what I’d work on next semester if I haven’t sorted out the questions raised this semester. And there is just no way for me to do what I need to do to get those decisions made (even if I added Sunday getting up at five, even if I took the two weeks I wanted for vacation between this semester and next)  and be ready for next semester with a new draft, a new direction or confidence in my old direction, if that’s what I decide is best.

What do I lose? Forward momentum. Connection to my wonderful classmates in my specific “class.” The intense immersion effect of doing two years consecutively. Being pushed by that sense of urgency and pressure. Connection to faculty.  Getting done sooner. And I’m not getting any younger…

What do I gain? Being able to deal with my novel in a way that makes the most sense and has the most integrity for me. Sorting out decisions without being too swayed by other people’s opinions. (One thing I’m convinced of is that I don’t want to write a novel by committee opinion.) Getting a more global perspective on what I’m learning. And honestly, getting a break from the pressure. I would be doing as much work on my novel anyway,  but taking a rest from reading four to six or more books a month plus the critical essays…

It’s not that I haven’t been keeping up, but I admit to breathing a huge sigh of relief when I think of just moving my novel forward, along with teaching, being with my kids, my husband, and all the rest, for a semester or a year.

This is a big turn-around for me, and I’d need to make the decision relatively quickly—we haven’t booked summer flights yet, but we should be doing that in the next few weeks.  I have already missed the school deadline so will be fined. I hate that, but I hate the idea more of moving forward without carefully examining what I have, what I want to have, what my vision is.

Your thoughts? What am I not seeing? What’s unsound in my logic?

Things do happen to Arvid; it is his world that is changing and he attempts, sometimes desperately, to respond to these changes. In being privy to his complicated responses, however, we change our relationship to the narrator as we read, developing deeper feelings and empathy for Arvid, resulting in a kinship that is not commonly felt with fictional characters. I Curse the River of Time is a very interesting novel, in my view, because it remains true to a complex view of human psychological reality (How much do people really change? How much do we understand about what happens to us, to our relationships? How much are we changed by circumstance and bumping up against them?) that may run counter to what readable fiction wants , while being palpably a piece of art—created, compressed, and sculpted—and providing the coherence, distance, and pleasures that art provides.

The most obvious component of artfulness in the novel is the layering of time frames and the choice of controlling narrative voice. There are three time zones in the novel: the present, referred to only very infrequently and in passing, when the narrator is in his fifties; 1989, the year the narrator’s wife asks for a divorce, his mother finds out she has stomach cancer and the Berlin Wall falls; and a time period in the 1970s, when the narrator leaves college in order to work in a factory and first meets the schoolgirl who is to become his wife. We get information about the narrator’s childhood, but only in relation to these other periods. The second two time periods are the ones that take up the bulk of narrative time and provide the story.

The current time, the locus of telling, however, has several subtle but important functions and they are announced with the utmost economy. The sentence which opens the novel, “All this happened quite a few years ago” (3) introduces the retrospective narrator and demonstrates one function: the present as compass point, referent. Later in the first chapter, a new section begins, “I cannot imagine she [the narrator’s mother] craved company in the cafeteria…” (11). Later still, “Nothing in the world was obvious to me back then…, nothing was simple” (110). These lines offer some commentary on, or are interpretative of, events in the past, but not in a lengthy or particularly illuminating way. The third type functions to show doubt in the accuracy of memory. “I don’t know how long I sat in that boat…” (75).  In none of these instances is the storyteller placed in a specific situation that prompts a memory, or even a chair from which to tell the story, but his presence permeates and complicates our reading.

What is Petterson’s reason for choosing the retrospective voice if he uses it only infrequently and briefly? Alice Mattison, in her recent essay in The Writer’s Chronicle, “Uncertainties That Keep a Reader Reading,” which focuses on curiosity as the driving force of any novel, argues that a narrative presence gives authority; it gives the reader the feeling that someone is in control and that everything being told is told for a reason. While reading I Curse the River of Time, the reader is always aware that the story is being told from the present; the narrator is, in a sense, managing the layering of time as he tells the story. This in turn makes palpable the art of the novel, the fact that we are being given filtered, contained reality, not the messy thing we live in our daily lives. I believe that the retrospective voice also functions thematically by adding a third layer of time to complicate our understanding of emotional reality: the fifty-year-old narrator is telling us a story that is not finished. The events happened, as he says, “quite a few years ago,” but still he is pondering them, trying to make sense of them, and the tone of the telling is not one of a man who has now found the answers. The river of time in the title continues and, I imagine, he continues to curse it.

What brings the reader close to the narrator, and builds an emotional connection to him and the story he tells, has much to do with the narrator’s vulnerability—his mistakes and his inability to understand why things are happening to him, particularly in the relationships he has with his wife and his mother. Arvid frequently fails to communicate his intentions in a straightforward or comprehensible fashion, which both he and the reader recognize. He states from the beginning that he was not close to his mother when she finds out that she has cancer and returns to her native country, Denmark. “I did not realize that my mother had left. There was too much going on in my own life. We had not spoken for a month, or even longer, which I guess was not that unusual… but it felt unusual. It felt unusual because it was intentional on my part. I was trying to avoid her, and I did so for I had no wish to hear what she might say about my life” (21).  However, the narrator decides, capriciously, to follow his mother.  One would think he would do this to aid or comfort her. Instead, in their first encounter on the beach, she asks him whether he needs money, and he thinks: “Jesus Christ. I knew she was ill, that she might even die: it was why I was here. It was why I had come after her. I was sure of it, and yet I said: ‘Mother, I’m getting a divorce’” (37).

The narrator often juxtaposes thoughts and actions in this way, without a simplifying explanation or interpretation from the supposed wisdom of years, and I find this to be terribly honest. Many novelists, even while using first person narrative, pry open a space after an action to reflect and interpret, if not from the narrator’s current perspective then from the perspective of years. I’m certain I do this. But there are things in life that we never get right and we might never know why or, if we do, we might not be able to change. This lack of interpretation, because in a way what interpretation does is shut something down, or finish it, draws me close to the narrator. I feel for him and with him. In some respects, I am him. In fact, in the novel we get scene after scene where the narrator seeks his mother’s love as a sort of refuge from reality and she doesn’t give it, at least not the way he wants. But that doesn’t stop the narrator from wanting it. The last line of the novel shows the narrator sitting on the shore, “waiting for [his] mother to stand up and come to [him]” (233). I find this repetition on the part of the narrator recognizable, and the inclusion of it, in fact the building of a whole novel around it, a naked and honest move.  Fortunately, these choices do not bog the novel down or make it boring because there is enough artfulness in its other aspects to keep one wanting to read.

A similar dynamic emerges as the narrator tells the story of his impending divorce. Chapter Three more fully introduces the narrator’s own circumstances in 1989, with two young daughters and on the brink of divorce. He takes his daughters on a day-trip that has no greater purpose than to watch fields and stop for a bite to eat. When they return home, his girls go straight to their bedroom, and he hears his wife’s footsteps before he sees her. He closes his eyes and keeps them closed. His wife says, “For Christ’s sake, Arvid… Please stop that. It’s so childish” (28) but he does not want to open his eyes, even though she’s right. He doesn’t want to see with his eyes what he knows. “It was all so clear to see. She [his wife] did not like [him] any more. She did not want [him]” (28).

The loveliest and saddest part of the novel comes toward the end, when readers are told the story of the beginning of the narrator’s relationship with the teenage girl who is to become his wife. In the final scene of the penultimate chapter, Arvid and his lover take a bus to a children’s camp on a lake where he went as a child. It is winter, and they are the last people on the bus, planning to stay for just one night in a cabin with a wood-fired stove. “…We had to make the most of this day, and then I fell asleep, and we both slept, and we woke up and went to sleep again” (209). What I find wonderful, and different about the inclusion of this scene at this point in the novel is that its purpose is not to finally reveal the experience from the past (in this case the overnight at the camp) that explains the problems of the present (the divorce). Often novelists turn in climax to such a past event to elucidate the main character’s psyche and, by doing so, sew up the novel. Petterson, by contrast, gives us the episode to make us feel more intensely the loss that the divorce entails, and its inexplicability. We see the couple’s young and aimless love on the lake, and we do not, in that, see seeds of their demise.

No, we see them behaving as any young lovers on holiday might: sleeping a lot, making love, smoking, and discussing gender roles: “‘Why don’t you row?’ she said. ‘Oh, sorry. Did you want to?’ I said. ‘It’s fine. I can sit here and watch you toil. You just row.’ She was probably good at rowing. Canoeing was my thing. Red Indian. Rowing boat was cowboy. ‘I’m the man,’ I said and laughed. ‘That’ right,’ she said and looked at me with narrow, almost dreamy eyes” (210). One could, I suppose, argue that the seeds are there: the assumptions, the role-playing, the abbreviated communication. But if that is true, then, again, many of us have been or are there. Relationships rely as much on ellipsis and miscommunication as they do on directness. The final words of that chapter come from the narrator on the brink of divorce, but also, I believe, from the present-day narrator. “The water around the boat fell silent, and silently the cabin was floating up above the rocks and the smoke rose softly from the chimney, and how impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust” (213).

Perhaps as I get older, I seek out and appreciate novels that artfully carry complicated views of how humans really are in the world. I am interested in reading and connecting with something I recognize as truth, while still being taken outside my own real life. It’s a tall order, but when it happens, it’s thrilling.

It is the perfect counterpoint to the crafty tool-orientated way I’ve been thinking (how to cultivate uncertainty, which information to withhold so that you will want to keep reading my novel) because it is about style, in the largest, deepest sense. Style, in this case, as opposed to craft.

Smith has big opinions. It’s part of her style. She writes, in explaining why craft can only get a writer so far,  “A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones.” There is much to argue with in this statement, if taken literally, but I agree, to some large extent, with the truth behind the comparisons–that writers cannot craft their way to brilliance. The rest of the essay is a kind of unpacking of what, if not craft, accounts for a writer’s style.

Smith begins by explaining on a descriptive level what she means.

“A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner.”

“Personality is much more than autobiographical detail, it’s our way of processing the world, our way of being, and it cannot be artificially removed from our activities; it is our way of being active…”

A writer’s work is “inflected” with the writer’s character.

Peter Carey, in his Paris Review interview, makes a similar point. When asked whether there is something that ties all his novels together, Carey says, “There was a stage where I might have said, ‘the invention of my country,’ but I think that as time goes on it’s a much looser bundle. Those things are for other people to see, not for me. It’s a little bit like being asked, Why do you walk the way you do? How do you walk? You don’t really know.”

Carey’s notion of gait, how it is particular to each person and unknowable by the person, is, I think, very close in its descriptive meaning to Smith’s use of personality or character. However, Smith’s notion of character takes on an active, choice-focused component, at least that is what it sounds like in her hands. In the last quarter of her essay, Smith introduces the idea of a writer’s duty, and this is where, for me, it really gets interesting, and hard.

Smith posits that “writers fail us when [the writing] is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry…” Focusing more narrowly on language, she writes, “with a cliché you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth.”

Followed to its logical extreme, Smith would be advocating that all writers be poets all the time because only in a poem can each word, each phrase, be interrogated to the extent that her statement implies. Again, however, if we take the essence of what she’s saying, it’s hard not to respect and want to embrace it. Every word I put on the page should be the word I have chosen. Every story I tell should be the most meaningful. Smith, in fact, goes on to say that “the very reason [she] write[s] is so that [she] might not sleepwalk through [her] entire life.” She moves with agility from the big picture, to the miniature, and back to the big, with its question of purpose.

What Smith advocates, instead of sleep-walking, is that each writer accurately and rigorously convey her particular world view. That the language a writer chooses “is the revelation of a consciousness,” and because each consciousness is different, all writing is different. Smith finds reason to celebrate the fact that every writer is (or should be) different from every other, every voice, every personality leaving its mark on a unique page.

At the same time, Smith acknowledges that for every writer, this truth is unknowable and therefore impossible. “Fact is, to tell the truth of your own conception–given the nature of our mediated world, given the shared and ambivalent nature of language, given the elusive, deceitful, deluded nature of the self–truly takes genius, truly demands of its creator a breed of aesthetic and ethical integrity that makes one’s eyes water just thinking about it.” Thus her title, “Fail Better.” All we can do, writes Smith, is fail better.

Barry Lopez, in his lecture at the recent winter residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, exhorted his audience to always have ethical relationships–with  themselves, with the reader, and with language.  He went at it a bit more prescriptively, enumerating what a writer needs to do to maintain these ethical relationships (“a bow of respect for the material,” “a beautiful structure”) but I doubt Smith would have disagreed with much, if anything, that Lopez suggested.

These perspectives are so exciting. I feel as though I’ve found a beautiful new sweater; I’ve tried it on and paid for it and rushed home to pull off the tags and put it on. Feeling attractive and excited, I wear it out, but gradually, over the course of the day, I become uncomfortable, something, something about the sweater, isn’t right. It’s subtle. But it’s there. Then I realize: what I thought in the store to be super soft wool has just the tiniest scratch to it. My skin is irritated, in a mild but all-over way. And it makes me feel cranky, not beautiful. There is something in what Smith and Lopez are saying that makes me cranky.

A writer’s psychology, our stance not only toward the world, toward people and our words and material, but toward the very complicated confluence that allows us, or forces us, or invites us to write, to make sense of the world through writing: how much of this is a matter of choice? The layers that make up who I am, who I believe I am, who I act like I am, who I want to be, and how this is imprinted again and again on how and what I write, from the impulse, from the schedule or lack thereof, the opening up of my laptop, from typing the words, from the story I choose to tell, the characters I imagine, the words with which I express what I see, the way I feel about it, whether I give it to others to read, how I respond to what they say.

Yes, I can stop and ask myself whether the metaphor I used is a cliché, whether I intend to respect and trust the reader. But it seems to me that there’s something else going on, and it’s not only about intention or responsiveness, not only about taking on the duty of the writer. I want to do it, but can I? What part of who we are, of who I am, is fixed? What part can I bend, mold, influence, work at so that I can do what I want to do, write what I want to write, walk how I want to walk? I’m left with that question.

The novel is presented in fourteen chapters with a total of 536 very brief, numbered segments*, some of them given bold headings, some not. The narrator, Money Breton, tells her story in the first person using present tense. It is a slightly risky novel, mostly in its voice and its relative lack of plot, the quirky, multiple-piece structure, but also in the way it insists on the emotional pain of the narrator.  I wouldn’t place it fully in the experimental arena but it is not literary mainstream. It’s one of my favorite kinds of novels, the kind of novel that, when it works, I adore and remember and make my friends read. How, then, did Mary Robison make Why Did I Ever readable?  How did she avoid the monotony that can hit with novels of this type, when the experiment (whatever that is–form, language) overwhelms the story? Is she employing some of the craft strategies that Alice Mattison, in her essay in The Writer’s Chronicle, “Uncertainties That Keep a Reader Reading,” proclaims make readers curious?

The most immediately noticeable aspect of the novel related to Mattison’s analysis is the quirky point of view of the narrator, and the vivid and surprising language through which it is conveyed. Here’s how the novel opens: “1. I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. ‘Well shit, man,’ I say in the dream. 2. Hollis and I have killed this whole Saturday together. We’ve been watched all fourteen hours of the PBS series, The Civil War. Now that it’s over he turns to me and says, ‘That was good’” (1). The dream already has odd content—a combination lock?—but the funny line, the one that bursts off the page, is what the narrator says. It’s surprising, and fresh, and it seems that the narrator herself is amused by what she says in her dream. Readers share her amusement. In segment two, we are introduced to quite an odd way to spend the day—fourteen hours watching a TV documentary. This reveals a lot of information in an extremely condensed form. We can extrapolate that the narrator has a long attention span, is a bit of an intellectual or a history buff, does not have children at home, and, perhaps, does not spend that much time speaking. (“Now that it’s over…” which would be fourteen hours later, Hollis turns to her and comments.)

Robison maintains, with her first-person narrator, this level of deadpan humor and originality throughout the book. From the middle: “About the Mercury Brothers’ script I think: O.K. get a lot of sleep tonight, war starts tomorrow. You’re going off to war. A plane will take you to the war place and a limo will fetch you so you don’t gotta worry about parking” (67). Near the end: “I say to myself, ‘We got a new day. Let’s just walk around the house and put shit where it goes.’ A lot goes down the disposal after I’ve warned the cat, ‘Stand clear’” (166). As wonderful as the character is, both in terms of the funny things she chooses to do, her commentary on them, and the things she says, I don’t think I would have read the entire novel if the quirky character/voice combination constituted the only pleasure. I would have felt full, maybe even bloated before reading all the way through. The character could have gotten tiresome, the way a hysterically funny friend at a dinner party who hits the same note over and over ultimately becomes dull (or infuriating).

Another technique Mattison describes that is apparent in Why Did I Ever is the withholding of information, and this withholding happens in a couple of different ways. Characters in the novel are not introduced in the usual way. We do not get a little summary, a brief physical description, a sort of introduction from the writer to the reader. In the lines quoted above, which provide the first mention of Hollis, one of the central characters of the novel, he is simply named, given a part (watching the documentary) and a one-line response. No need for the  social niceties of an introduction. And because of the balance of information given and information withheld, we are made curious. In segment five, we hear a little more. “Hollis is not my ex-anything and not my boyfriend. He’s my friend. Maybe not the best friend I have in the world. He is, however, the only” (2). Again, curious. Is he really just a friend? And is he not a good friend? Which serves, of course, to make us more curious about the narrator. She only has one friend? Why? Other characters are introduced in a similar way.

The second and most conspicuous type of withholding is demonstrated by the way Robison parcels out of information about the narrator’s adult son. He is first introduced on page four, in the same abrupt manner as the others. “‘I need plywood,’ said my son, Paulie, in his sleep. Or I heard wrong. I know it was ‘need’ something. That was my first day there, at his flat on St. Anne, before the NYPD began hiding him” (4). We learn in the same passage that his hands are bandaged, and he is asleep at the dining table. This is, of course, a rather traditional move but I think it’s key to keeping the reader moving forward, especially for a novel with so little plot. In her essay, Mattison gives an example from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Greene’s technique is more complex than Robison’s since his novel is told through an alternating narrative based in different chronological times. The reader learns a bit of information about a central event but is then interrupted by another story, going back in time. In this way, “Greene keeps much of [the] information back until he is ready for you to learn it” (37), making the novel suspenseful. Robison’s simpler technique has the same effect. We want to know why the narrator’s son Paulie has bandaged hands and is about to be placed into hiding. We sense something bad has happened to him and we keep reading in part to find out what. As we suspect, when at the end of the novel all the pieces have accumulated, the story is horrifying.

Robison has constructed a character we care deeply about. Money’s actions let us know from early on that something is troubling her. “I end up at Appletree—the grocery—in the dead of the night. I’m not going to last long shopping, though, because this song was bad enough when what’s-her-name sang it. And who are all these people at four A.M.? I’m making a new rule: No one is to touch me. Unless and until I feel different about things. Then, I’ll call the rule off” (2). She is a complicated person who has been badly wounded—that much is clear. We are curious to find out what, to understand, and as we continue to read, propelled by that curiosity, we come to care about her. We cheer the good things in her life (her cat, her friendship with Hollis) and watch as she changes. And she does change over the course of the novel. She acquires a boyfriend, Dix, whom she goes to visit in his home because she won’t reveal to him where she lives. Then one day, he shows up in front of her house. “Who leaked to him my home address? Was it Bell-Fuckwad-South?” (91). But does Money demand that he leave immediately and break off the relationship? No. “He’s holding his electric-blue bats, I’m lying down on the concrete porch letting my eyes roll back into my head. I wish one of the ex-husbands would come along. This could look like a scene from a Cuban film” (91). She comments with her typical wry humor but she also lets the boyfriend stay.

One strategy that is not addressed by Mattison that seems particularly relevant for this novel is the contrast between the tone of the narrative (surprising, funny, full of energy) and the emotional content (depressing). I don’t think I could have finished the novel if tone and content were equally dark, and it would have been uninteresting if both were light. I’ve read the advice that movie soundtracks should not duplicate the action—in other words, playing “scary” music during a scary scene is a cheap trick. I would add that it flattens a piece, and makes it predictable. Why Did I Ever is anything but flat.

With the elements that arouse curiosity, and the biting humor of the narrator despite her dislocated, depressed state, readers are compelled to read to the end. Because the novel is not plot-driven, there is no climax per se, and no traditional happy ending with the pieces sewn up, but we do in the end feel that Money will survive, that she will not cut herself off completely from intimate human contact, and there is relief and beauty in that.

*I read that several years ago Robison suffered from terrible writer’s block and in order to overcome it began writing on index cards. She used the cards to put this novel together.

Mattison begins the essay by explaining that she frequently has to read novels in progress by student writers that just don’t hold her interest, and that she is writing in response to this problem. She gives an extremely general but also extremely useful one word answer to the question of what makes a reader keep reading: curiosity.  She writes, “This essay will concern itself with whatever makes us curious, whatever provides forward momentum–acknowledging that an elaborate, dramatic plot–or a simple but compelling plot–is the customary way of keeping us involved” (33)

But Mattison doesn’t stop with plot.  Through her close examination of several great novels, she generalizes about what makes the reader curious and I’ve listed a number of her points here.

1. Knowing more about the main character and what will happen to him than he himself knows, and waiting “with growing anticipation” (35) for him to figure it out (The Magic Mountain)

2. Always having a sense of moving through time (The Magic Mountain)

3. A number of uncertainties, “each one keeping us interested at least until we come to the next” (35) (The Magic Mountain)

4. Scenes and events which “embody the conflicts within the characters’ personalities” (36) (The Sun Also Rises)

5. Scenes which are dominated by a question in the reader’s mind (The Sun Also Rises)

6. A plot that withholds, giving partial but not complete information (The Quiet American)

7. The storyteller’s or author’s presence–and the sense this gives readers that someone is in control of the story and the way it’s being told. “[S]omewhere there’s an author, and the author, at least, thinks we’re moving in a direction, [thereby giving] us all the reassurance we need to keep paying attention” (34). (The Quiet American)

8. Waiting to know what happens next to characters we care about (The Years–which is particularly good at this because many years pass and we see children become adults)

9. Knowing at the beginning what the trouble is and then seeing that trouble embodied in events (The Years, The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West, and The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead–three novels that Mattison groups together as family novels)

10. Characters who have intense and possibly irrational feelings (The Years)

11. Descriptions which are vivid and engrossing, with mesmerizing but not oppressive formal repetition (The Years)

12. Causality–when one scene causes what happens in the next scene, with mounting importance (The Sun Also Rises, The Fountain Overflows)

Mattison ends her essay with this advice: “If we are novelists whose thoughts first go to characters and situations rather than to stories, maybe we should stop and decide, early on, what in our characters’ lives can be arranged so as to make our readers curious… We need to tell our stories in an order that will be interesting and suspenseful… [W]e need to think up actions that will be tangible results of  our character’s  feelings and personalities and will have further consequences in other actions…. In other words, we should give our people not just characteristics but characteristic action, and let that action have results that accumulate into something big…. And perhaps most importantly, we should make our characters as strange and outrageous and passionate as real people are, so that while our readers roll or tramp steadily toward their destination, something will keep them not just curious but happy” (40)

I plan to test these generalizations against novels that did or did not keep me reading in future posts. And of course I’m busily testing my own novel-in-progress against Mattison’s curiosity imperative and figuring out ways to both revise and move forward with her points in mind.

You can find Alice Mattison’s complete essay in The Writer’s Chronicle, Volume 43 Number 4

On the first page of the novel, the two main characters, Rebecca and Peter, are in a cab in New York City. They are on their way to a party but stopped in traffic because of an accident.  Several very minor characters are introduced in this initial scene. First, “[a]n elderly bearded man in a soiled, full-length down coat, grand in his way (stately, plump Buck Mulligan?), pushes a grocery cart full of various somethings in various trash bags, going faster than any of the cars” (3). For most Americans, this man is a recognizable type in urban settings. Cunningham could have used shorthand, writing more economically: a homeless man pushes a shopping cart. Readers would have understood who the figure overtaking the cab was. He chose, however, to give specific details and thereby, to some extent at least, humanize this man, taking him out of a generic category and making him an individual.

Does Cunningham, in this act of artistic humanization, risk misleading his readers, who could see this greater level of detail as a signal that the homeless man will become important to the story? My writing group has sometimes given me the feedback, when I introduce a character that I see as incidental that they liked or were intrigued by the person and expected to see more of him or her. How does Cunningham avoid the issue of reader expectation or attachment? In this instance, I would argue that readers know on an intuitive level that someone passing by on the street, no matter how fully described, is unlikely to continue to feature in the novel. Therefore, Cunningham isn’t creating last attachment by particularizing such a character.

The second minor character is the cab driver himself, who is described for the first time three pages into the cab ride. Notice that the description interrupts itself midway through to include a brief argument for making what could have been a generic character more human: “His bald head sits solemnly on the brown plinth of his neck. He, of course, has his own story, and it does not in any way involve the well-dressed middle-aged couple in the back of his cab. His name, according to the plate on the back of the front seat, is Rana Saleem” (5). Cunningham, through the narrator who at this instance is very close to the author himself, tells the reader that every human being is important and different from every other, even when that person fits a type, even when the character is a taxi driver and mainly there to get the couple from their apartment to the party.The narrator, as author stand-in, is also alerting readers to the fact that we should not become attached to this character because, if we are to trust this narrator which I think we have reason to, the cab driver will not become an important character in the story because he is not connected to its main characters. In this instance, we are getting rather direct instruction for what expectations not to develop.

The narrative voice continues immediately, changing to a closer third person: “India? Iran? He might have been a doctor where he comes from. Or a laborer. Or a thief. There’s no way of knowing” (5). Peter is the main point of view character of the novel and here we get some insight into who Peter is by how he thinks about the cab driver. He imagines different stories, more or less fantastical, about the cabbie’s life but concludes that he can’t find out the true story. There is, of course, a way to get at least some information–Peter could start a conversation with him and ask. Instead, he retreats from knowing, from getting closer to this immigrant man, and this clues the reader in to where and with whom Peter feels at ease, and indicates his fear of connection.

When the next cab driver is introduced, it is more briefly, and, in fact, parenthetically: “(this driver’s name is Abel Hibbert, he’s young and jumpy, silent, fuming)” (13). Cunningham has made his point–every human has his own story even if that human is a character in a novel–but complicates it here by showing that we, as readers and as people in the world,  may not feel (like Peter) that we have the time, energy, ability, or interest to get close to everyone we encounter, particularly not in a short novel or in a crowded city like New York. Similarly, a writer cannot write extensively about every character in his novel. By Nightfall is a relatively small-format hardback, coming in at 238 pages. Despite his goal to humanize all characters, Cunningham doesn’t have the intention, and thus doesn’t choose to take the time, to describe every single one in great detail. Though he, and we, have ideals, practical considerations and choices affect our daily, and our artistic, lives.

When Cunningham does go a bit further into a minor character, it is with the intention to add resonance to a theme he’s developing in the novel. About a third of the way into the book, Peter and a fellow art dealer go out for lunch and visit an art museum. They’ve come expressly to see an exhibit they’ve both seen before: a dead shark floating in a steel tank. There are others walking around the tank and viewing it as well. “The high school kids gather before the shark’s midsection, all but trembling with fear and sexuality and disdain, speaking softly in a private language… One of the girls puts a hand on the glass, pulls it quickly away again. The other two girls shriek and run from the gallery as if their friend has set off an alarm” (37).  In this instance, these minor characters respond emotionally and intuitively to the shark in a way that  Peter the sophisticated art dealer will not let himself. While Peter feels a “prickle of animal panic” (36) when he first sees the shark, and his stomach lurches, he goes immediately into intellectualizing his response to the art.

Bette, the art dealer accompanying Peter to the museum, revealed to Peter at lunch that she has cancer. Her response to the shark is different from Peter’s and the teenagers’. “Bette strides up to the front of the tank, bends over slightly to see into the shark’s open maw” (37). Bette, at her age and in her condition, must face the shark in a way that neither Peter nor the teenagers have to. This is brilliantly displayed by contrasting the various responses. We would not have understood Bette, a more important character in the novel, if we hadn’t seen her juxtaposed with the minor teenage characters.

Readers, and therefore authors, have to navigate trickier issues of attachment when characters are introduced that we should perhaps be paying closer attention to–characters with some connection to the plot, to the main characters, or to emerging themes of the novel. One such character in By Nightfall is Carole Potter, introduced about half-way through the novel. One morning, Peter’s assistant at his gallery lets Peter know that Carole Potter has called. When Peter seems surprised that she’s called so early, his assistant responds, “Darling, Carole Potter gets up in the mornings and feeds her fucking chickens” (71). Peter goes on to think: “Right. Carole Potter, heiress to a kitchen appliance fortune, lives on a farm in Connecticut. A Marie Antoinette-style farm, granted: herb gardens, exotic chickens that cost as much as pure-bred dogs” (71).  In the next several pages, Carole’s character is developed with many specific details, Peter avoids calling her then finally does, and, it becomes clear, she will play a role in moving the plot of the novel forward–she provides Peter with the opportunity to make a big sale, thereby possibly taking his career to the next level. Should the reader become attached to Carole Potter?

On a first read, at this point in the novel, it’s an open question. The writer has described in varying degrees of specificity other characters that do not return. We’ve been given no explicit authorial instruction on whether to become attached to Carole. But is this confusing? I would say no. Readers don’t need to be completely sure. As we read, we formulate and revise hunches. Will readers be let down if the character turns out to be only incidental?  Again, in most cases not. Readers of finished, published (and therefore not malleable) texts do not develop such a degree of investment that they would feel let down by a minor character’s disappearance.

Carole Potter turns out to be somewhere in the middle of minor and main characters. In Peter’s point of view, Carole not only helps his art career, she facilitates the walk to the beach that ends in the all-important kiss with his brother-in-law, Mizzy. But we never know what Carole wants, and Peter’s explanation (“Does she suspect he’d like to be alone with Mizzy? Does she actually imagine that he’s not a brother-in-law at all, but a boyfriend Peter keeps on the sly?” [188]) is typical for him, a bit self-obsessed, neurotic, and not one the reader interprets as “the truth.”

The final pages of the novel give credence to the theory that the question of minor characters, of who is incidental, is not simply a craft question but is in fact thematic. The artist hanging her show in Peter’s gallery has made several short videos of real people whom she does not know. The five videos are projected, and on a shelf in each of five areas, the artist has arranged so-called ancillary merchandise–she’s turned the person in the video into an action figure, an image on a T-shirt, a lunch box, even a Halloween costume. Peter, in thinking about the installation, concludes that “[i]t’s adroit. Sure it has elements of irony and condescension, but it is at heart… an homage. Everybody is a star, on his or her home planet” (210). In this case, the third person voice could be understood to speak for Peter and for Michael Cunningham, echoing the sentiment about the cab driver at the beginning of the novel. But, Peter concludes, the art does not move him enough; he needs more than this. Moments later, he asks himself: “What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story?” (226).

Essentially, this is a novel about a man struggling with questions that circle around the issue of leading an average, or normal, life, and whether that’s enough. Cunningham deftly uses the layering of these minor characters–the cab and limo drivers, the teenagers in the art museum, and the art patrons, even the creations of the artists themselves, the average people in the videos–to raise this question. On an artistic level, Cunningham is convinced from the beginning of the novel that we are all main characters in our own lives even though we might appear as minor characters in the lives of others. But he lets Peter struggle with this question through the entire book. It is not until the final few pages that Peter returns, in a sense, to his own life, to his wife, to be the hero of his own story in his own mind rather than dreaming about casting aside the life he has for a new one.