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If that’s the case, it applies to quite a lot of her contemporaries. Tim O’Brien
has made a career out of cobbling stories together into novels, most famously in
his two Vietnam novels, Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried. He
has said that writing in shorter, self-contained units has several advantages. For
one thing, stories (unlike chapters in some novels) have beginnings, middles, and
ends and thereby give emotional satisfaction to readers. Writing story-chapters
also allows him to publish pieces ahead of the novel’s appearance, allowing him
to gauge readers’ response and offering the chance to make money on the stories
themselves. A warning here to budding writers: there are so few paying venues
for short fiction these days (even compared to when O’Brien made those
comments in the 1980s) that this angle is not a strong rationale for this mode of
writing. I don’t want to set up any false expectations. We see it in that other
O’Brien, Edna, in her alarming In the Forest. The main character, or perhaps
main focus or inquiry, is a seriously unhinged young man who commits multiple
murders. For good and sound reasons, we’d rather not spend any more time
inside his head than we must, so it falls to others to report his conduct and that of
the village that creates him.
These novels are many things, but cookie-cutter is not one of them. You’ll
never think, “This was built from a kit.” Precisely because each one needs to
justify itself, to establish its unity in its own way, each one is unique. And that
goes for novels by the same writer. One of my favorite practitioners of the mode
is the English Julian Barnes. He made his name in this country with Flaubert’s
Parrot (1984), about a doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, whose life story
suspiciously resembles that of Emma Bovary’s hapless husband, Charles. The
novel is filled with Braithwaite’s mini-essays, personal reminiscences, pet
peeves, jokey lists, and even a parody final examination. It has really only one
conventionally narrative chapter, called “Pure Narrative,” and it is heartbreaking
indeed. One sees in that chapter why the main character must approach his issues
indirectly, through the filter of Gustave Flaubert and especially his two signature
works, Madame Bovary and the short story “A Simple Heart.” The novel
establishes its unifying rationale through Braithwaite’s psychological needs and
intellectual defenses. His subsequent work, A History of the World in 10
1
/2
Chapters (1989), is much less character-driven and indeed proves resistant to
classification. Is it a novel, a set of essays and narratives, a collection of short
stories, or what? I tend to follow the writer, and since he says it’s a novel, that’s
okay with me. Even when he returns to character-driven fiction, as in Arthur and
George (2005), a tale of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement in righting the
judicial wrongs done to George Edalji, who was improperly committed in a case
of animal mutilation early in the last century, Barnes shies away from the sort of
conventional narrative favored in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels.
The pressure of the tale—from event to accusation to trial to conviction to
appeal to eventual vindication—pushes the novel toward linearity, toward, in
fact, the detective story, yet Barnes, who also writes detective fiction under the
pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, understands how to exploit the genre without sliding
into it. The tension between expectation and performance adds to the drama of
the narrative: we know what the Holmesian version of this would sound like, and
this isn’t it. Rather, it’s something far richer, far more capable of complexity and
nuance, yet still possessed of the same urgency as the best detective stories.
You know by now that I’m a fan of slightly deranged narratives. One of my
favorite creators of same is the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson. Poet, Gracie? Yes,
very much so—poet, musician, memoirist, essayist, fabulist, novelist. Plus, in
poetry he’s almost normal. A lyric poem is a lyric poem in his hands, but a prose
narrative? Almost unclassifiable. Sometimes more than almost. The Star Factory
(1997) may be a memoir, but it’s a memoir like no other, combining personal
experience of growing up in Belfast before the Troubles and of life there during
them, industrial history, local legend, etymologies, and meditations on the sign
system of his father’s glowing cigarette tip in the darkness. When he turns to
more purely fictive material, as he does in Fishing for Amber (1999), the weave
is just as complex, bringing together tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, usually
ribald in the retelling, Irish fairy stories of a particularly dark cast that generally
focus on abduction and hazard, wild tales of painters and painting from the
Dutch golden age. The book is quite beyond genre. Carson subtitles it A Long
Story, which is undeniable. It is book-length, fictive, and somewhat unified by
subject matter, theme, and form. Is that a novel? It sounds like one, sort of. Is it
as unified as we would like a novel to be? That depends on who’s doing the
liking.