As you may or may not know, I happen to be working on a collection of interrelated short stories spanning a few different continents and a web of connected characters and world events. It is also the case that I've recently read a spate of novels in the same vein, and am intrigued by the mechanics of each (very different) collection of stories.
I'd like to chat with you about three of those novels, and get off my chest what worked for me and what didn't, and see if you agree. Please don't agree. It's so much more fun that way.
Let's start with Colum McMann's now-famous Let the Great World Spin. This collection is perhaps the most tightly knit of the three books we're discussing, and the POVs of each character intertwine to create two beautiful and sorrowful plot lines. But McMann plays a clever trick in his novel: he uses the 1974 man-on-wire incident to tie the novel to a concrete place in time, as well as to provide a backdrop for the stories he weaves in and around New York City. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, French tightrope walker Phillipe Petit managed to string a cable between the World Trade Center buildings in the summer of 1974 and walked, skipped, and danced his way between the two towers repeatedly until finally apprehended by the NYPD. It's a stunning, symbolic act of artistic hubris and defiance of law that anchors the novel and imbues the stories with a sense of I-was-there verisimilitude. McMann begins his story in Ireland, with a protracted chapter that is so clever as to be self-congratulatory, and so long as to mislead the reader into thinking that our first narrator will also be our last. We meet one of the central characters of the novel through the eyes of his brother, and witness the greater part of their childhoods from that perspective. I almost put the book down two-thirds of the way through the first chapter. It felt forced, coerced; the narrator slid over years with a sentence and his characterization of his brother seemed too reverent to be realistic.
I'm delighted and relieved that I didn't stop reading. As soon as I got past the first chapter, the novel roared to life, with beautifully wrought, thoughtfully written perspectives alternating between the Irish brothers and their menagerie of friends and lovers and a middle-aged socialite who is falling apart after losing her son to the war in Vietnam. Each voice is distinct, each perspective clear, and by the end of the novel I was heartbroken by the beautiful stories. If some brave editor had hacked that first chapter in half, it would have been love.
This seems to be a theme for me...
Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad was named on of the best books of 2010 by just about everybody that makes a list of that sort, and I ordered it on impulse without knowing the first (or lamentably, last) thing about it.This collection is much more restrained. The choir of voices narrating the story rise over the course of four or five decades, teasing out revelatory episodes from her characters' lives that illuminate their silences or absences throughout the rest of novel. We never see the full picture; there is no satisfying knowing at the end. Rather, Egan pulls various threads throughout the books, showing us a man at fifteen and then again at thirty and fifty, but all through different eyes, different perspectives. The effect is dizzying and lovely, and precludes expository fillers. We experience the titillation of dramatic irony; the narrator might not understand why Bernie is acting that way, but I do.
I was completely taken in by this collection - in fact, I believe that the first chapter of this book, and several others beyond that, are perfectly written: tight, beautiful, honest. Many could stand alone as stories outside the metanarrative. And so my devastation was pretty extreme (it was ugly, dear reader) when I came to a point three-quarters of the way through the novel and there was a chapter written in PowerPoint.
Seriously. It was written on PowerPoint slides, one per page.
Even worse, the conceit was that it was the perspective of a teenaged girl, and that she kept her diary in this format because she liked to toy with the SmartArt functions to organize her thoughts.
Full stop.
1. I teach teenagers for a living.
2. I love PowerPoint. SmartArt makes me weak in the knees.
3. Teenagers do not love SmartArt. They also do not love PowerPoint.
4. Teenagers do not keep diaries on PowerPoint.
And then, in the last chapter of Goon Squad, we find ourselves in the near-future, a science-fiction reality where everyone is totally dependent on their smartphones for communication. Children, who are called "pointers," apparently because they can figure out smartphone technology while still preverbal, are making and breaking musician's careers based on their arbitrary music selections. All in all, a disappointing, slightly bizarre finale in an otherwise well-crafted novel. It's a case of trying too hard and all the worse because Egan didn't need to. Her prose, without the gimmicks, would have held up to scrutiny.
The last collection, The Imperfectionists, by journalist Tom Rachman, isn't crippled by weak links as Egan and McMann's collections are, but it also doesn't soar to the heights that Let the Great World Spin and A Visit from the Goon Squad frequent. The locus of the collection is an international newspaper in Rome. Rachman tells the stories of the various writers and editors that haunt its columns from the paper's inception in the 50s through its closure in 2007. The chapters jump from Rome to Paris to an airplane headed for Atlanta, each with a (very) different character, decade, circumstance. Rachman, who actually worked in a newsroom in Rome, has all of the details just right, down to the newsman jargon and misogynistic overtones of the world of journalism. One chapter in particular has a twist that you don't see coming and that makes your stomach sink as the truth becomes clear.Rachman's fetch is the use of newspaper headlines as chapter names. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't. But the rest of the book is sincere and sympathetic to its characters without being sentimental. The imperfect people that appear in this novel are well-crafted, realistic, and flawed - everything I love in a character. And the newspaper is a fine vehicle to tie these disparate lives together: it gives common ground to the characters without any expectation of real commonality.
Again, we have an imperfect view of the world our characters inhabit. There is no exposition, other than the inter-chapter italicized backstory, which Rachman uses to tell the story of the various owners of the paper. But even those chapters are limited to the POV of the character they describe, so we never get a bird's eye view of the plot. Long story short, The Imperfectionists does the interconnected-story-novel well, if not ingeniously. It also reminded me that I'd like to go back to Rome for a bit.
Anyway, what do you think about these novels? Is it innovative or contrived to use PowerPoint as a vehicle? How much exposition does the reader need to be satisfied with the plot?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Talk soon,
Rachel
