February 12, 2007
Reviewed by Alison Andrews

 

So tell me, what makes you keep turning the pages?

 

If you’re like a lot of people, it’s the plot. The anonymous literary agent Miss Snark, whose venom-tinged, yet hilarious advice to writers has earned her quite a following, receives a lot of unpublished novels that begin with someone waking up in the morning. Or a dream. Or two characters talk, talk, talking about a situation. Can you spot what all of these openings have in common?

 

That’s right, in all of them nothing actually happens. It’s all setup and/or backstory. If something doesn’t happen before too many pages, the reader’s going to lose interest. This is why Aristotle recommended beginning in medias res, in the middle of the action. As Miss Snark puts it, set someone’s hair on fire. We don’t even need to know much about the person running around in circles screaming. We’re automatically interested. You can tell us more about who and why and how it all began in the next scene.

 

One Good Turn Deserves . . .

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson doesn’t begin with flaming hair, but it does open with a dramatic event. A crowd lined up outside a theatre watches as a fender-bender triggers an act of near-homicidal rage.

 

Among the bystanders are mild-mannered novelist Martin, who uncharacteristically intervenes by throwing his laptop at the offender, thereby saving the victim’s life and making the lonely Martin feel connected to him. Another witness is ex-police officer and ex-private detective Jackson Brodie, a character in Atkinson’s last novel, Case Histories. These two aren’t the only characters whose stories get told in One Good Turn. No, there are a dizzying number of characters whose points of view are represented, from the wife of a dishonest real estate tycoon to a mysterious Russian dominatrix to a washed-up comedian to a rebellious teenage boy and his mother, a stressed-out police detective.

 

Atkinson is a competent novelist who manages to keep this Pandora’s box of material under control--but just barely. Some of the chapters seemed superfluous; I could have done entirely without hearing the point of view of Louise, the police detective, whose thoughts seemed to circle with depressing monotony around her inability to understand her teenage son. The information we learn from her could have been told from Jackson’s point of view. It was hard for me to understand why Jackson is attracted to her (although the author kept hitting this particular nail on the head every time the two of them encounter each other).

 

The characters are always thinking about their opinions or their past (this was the literary part of the book), and I found those parts tiring. Please, I thought, you started with some action; please just let something happen. My request was granted often enough to give me the stamina to make it to the end of the book, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled by my experience.

 

My advice to writers is: if you’re savvy enough to set someone’s hair on fire in the first chapter, please make that person and their acquaintances interesting enough to be worth hanging out with for several hundred pages. I liked Case Histories better than this novel; maybe one of the problems is that Atkinson may have drained all the interest out of Jackson and his girlfriend, who are both repeat characters. Maybe next time she’ll find some new characters whose personalities are as exciting as the plot here attempts to be.

 

My View of Castle Rock

Then there are writers who never set much on fire, but whose books you can’t put down. Alice Munro is one such writer. I read every story she writes, knowing I’m going to enjoy it. And although things do happen in her stories--she doesn’t follow the “literary” stereotype of characters sitting around talking about the meaninglessness of life--I don’t think she’s ever written about a man being bludgeoned with a baseball bat. And that’s okay with me.

 

Munro’s latest book is The View from Castle Rock, and it is the closest thing she has written to autobiography. In it, she transforms her family’s history into fiction. It was fascinating for me, as a long-time reader, to see which parts of her history have shown up in earlier stories, but prior experience with her work isn’t a prerequisite to enjoying this book.

 

The first half of the book follows Munro’s ancestors who immigrated to the New World from a part of Scotland described in the 1799 Statistical Account of Scotland as having “no advantages.” Next come six stories closer to Munro’s own life. All of them feature a young girl who feels like an outsider, and whose ability of acute observation causes her to judge harshly the rural, puritanical world that constrains her. Like Munro, she will escape this world, but as other outsiders have learned, she will not feel she belongs in the new world or in the old, when she returns as an adult. As Geraldine Brooks writes in The Washington Post, “We have met this girl/woman many times in Munro's stories; the writer's genius has been to find so many rich permutations within this familiar narrative arc.”

 

The best thing I can say about Munro is that her work feels like real life without the boring parts. This has much to do with the absolute surety of her narrative voice. I would suggest that, far more than plot, it is voice that keeps us reading a writer’s work. An excellent writer’s voice is as distinctive as a great singer’s. It draws us in, makes us want to listen, convinces us that the writer is telling us the truth (even if the story is completely fictional). A good writer’s voice makes us believe, whether or not anything is on fire.

 

ninetyandnine.com

 

© 2007, Alison Andrews

 

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Alison Andrews lives near Ft. Worth, Texas, with her husband and children. She would like to thank the person who invented preschool.