Novels That Shouldn’t Work But Do Work—and Why Part I

Some novelists break rules.  It’s so annoying.  You, as a dutiful writer, labor endlessly, revising and revising to get a manuscript exactly right.  You study, cut, revise, beta, sensitivity read.  You find comps and kill your darlings until your floor is slippery with blood.  You craft a novel that fits the market and which cannot possibly raise objections.

And then there are the wise guys.  The ones who don’t seem to care.  They go ahead and write exactly what they want, offend without concern, ignore the rules, throw away the craft books and indulge in freeform story structure.  They stick up their middle fingers to time-tested advice and—worse—get published.

Not only published but lauded.  Showered with awards.  Paperback editions stuffed with pages and pages of pull quotes and praise.  How do those writers get away with it?  Why is it okay for them to do as they please while you paper your bathroom with rejections?

Breathe.

When rule breakers succeed there are reasons.  They do not have hall passes that others do not get.  Their writing works because it works, it’s just that how it works isn’t immediately obvious.  Take a step back and rebel novels often aren’t as rebellious as they seem.  They may affect long hair, cigarettes and white tee shirts but really underneath they cuddle up to timeless story principles.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s take a close look at a category of stories that should not work but in more than a few instances do work: episodic novels.  These are stories that do not pose an obvious and immediate plot problem.  They do not proceed in tidy chronological fashion, one plot development leading directly to the next.  They are an assembly of clumps; a jumble of episodes that somehow sum up to something greater than their parts.

Episodic novels have a long history.  Think Gulliver’s Travels.  Episodic novels also have sub-categories such as the satiric form known as picaresque novels.  Don Quixote.  The History of Tom Jones.  Moll Flanders.  Vanity Fair.  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  The Adventures of Augie March.  Bildungsroman and coming-of-age stories can be episodic in form, too.  To Kill a Mockingbird.  So can linked short stories, journey stories and quilt novels that build a patchwork portrait of a time or place.  Winesburg, Ohio.  The Red Garden.

What, then, ties together a flea market of scenes?  What gives a hodgepodge collection of character types a unity?  How does story chaos crystalize into order and purpose?  Let’s take a look.

The Unifying Purpose of Wandering Tales

Opening up an episodic novel, one might well ask why should I be reading this novel?  If the point of the story is not to solve a murder, save the world, or pair up two people who probably later in life will need couples therapy, then what is the point?  There’s a protagonist but what precisely is the problem that needs solving or what purpose needs to be fulfilled?  The reason that we should read on needs to be established right away, otherwise why keep going?

Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (2011) is a novel mostly set on a sea voyage from Sri Lanka to England in the early 1950’s.  An unaccompanied, eleven-year-old boy named Michael is aboard a liner and at mealtimes is relegated in the dining cabin to the “cat’s table”, the one farthest from the captain’s table.

Ondaatje, who himself took such a voyage as a youth, opens with Michael reflecting on his life’s travels to that point:

What had there been before such a ship in my life? A dugout canoe on a river journey?  A launch in Trincomalee harbour?  There were always fishing boats on our horizon.  But I could never have imagined the grandeur of this castle that was to cross the sea.  The longest journeys I had made were car rides to Nuwara Eliya and Horton Plains, or the train of Jaffna, which we boarded at seven a.m. and disembarked from in the late afternoon. We made that journey with our egg sandwiches, some thalagulies, a pack of cards and a small Boy’s Own adventure.

But now it had been arranged I would be traveling to England by ship, and that I would be making the journey alone.

Michael’s awe at a ship is the overt topic of this opening but buried within it are a promise to the reader.  We sense it in the choice of words.  Ship.  Journey.  Horizon.  Castle.  Adventure.  Alone.  What are we being assured of if we continue reading?  Of all the promise words the most powerful, ask me, is adventure.  Stick with Michael and we will experience wonders.  We will be amazed.  We will see things and learn lessons.  We will be glad we went along.

Isn’t that enough reason to read any volume?

In Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut opens in a quasi-documentary mode, in part because his novel will later blast off into wildly speculative territory, including a flying saucer voyage to a planet called Tralfamadore.  Like Ondaatje, Vonnegut actually lived through the novel’s central event, the WWII bombing of the city of Dresden, where Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in a converted slaughterhouse:

All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.  One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his.  Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.  And so on.  I’ve changed all the names.

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967.  It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has.  There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.

I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war.  His name was Gerhard Müller.  He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while.  We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing.  But things were much better now.  He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education.  His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm.  So it goes.

He sent O’Hare a postcard at Christmas, and here is what it said:

“I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.”

Such a curious opening.  Why focus on a Dresden taxi driver and report about a broken-English holiday postcard?  Again, look for the words of story promise.  War.  Killed.  Money.  Bone.  Friends.  Prisoners.  Peace.  Freedom.  Accident.  In a way, is the promise any different than in Ondaatje’s novel?  The author is perhaps telling us that his tale will be more fearful and harrowing than a sea voyage, but it will nevertheless be an adventure: one with big themes, high meaning and sewing up what seem like “accidents” into something more.  Vonnegut’s narrator is telling us to keep reading.  The tale may at first feel haphazard but there’s a point to it all.  Count on it.

Notice, too, Vonnegut’s tone of authority.  He doesn’t apologize for giving his protagonist Billy Pilgrim (get it?) a novel’s worth of space.  He doesn’t bother breaking up run-on sentences.  He doesn’t force the significance of the taxi driver on us with elevated prose, almost the opposite.  “Accident” suggests fate, and while the operation of fate may feel arbitrary to you, you can in the end make sense of it if you try.

Isn’t that enough reason to read any volume?

In The Graveyard Book (2008), Neil Gaiman takes a more traditionally narrative approach in his opening, as a knife-wielding killer called “the man Jack” stalks through a house looking for a baby, who is not in his crib as he is supposed to be:

The man Jack sniffed the air.  He ignored the scents that had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he had come to find.  He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, nighttime diaper.  He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery—a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck—that the child had been carrying.

The child had been here.  It was here no longer…

Ever since the child had learned to walk he had been his mother and father’s despair and delight, for there was never such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for getting into and out of things.  That night, he had been woken by the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with a crash.  Awake, he soon became bored, and had begun looking for a way out of his crib.  It had high sides, like the walls of his playpen downstairs, but he was convinced that he could scale it.  All he needed was a step…

A baby killer.  A baby escape artist.  Menace sets the tone but balanced against that is the pluck of an extraordinary toddler.  Notice the old-fashioned locution used to introduce him: “…for there was never such a boy for wandering, climbing up things, for getting into and out of things.”

The boy in question, Nobody Owens, aka Bod, is no ordinary boy.  He’s from the same school of boyhood as Jack of beanstalk fame.  What lies ahead are episodes from a childhood spent in a graveyard.  How can the novel that we are heading into be anything but full of danger, destiny and creepy fun?

Isn’t that enough reason to read any volume?

The Lesson

What we’ve learned so far, then, is that episodic novels may collect discrete episodes—that is, separate and seemingly stand-alone units—but the parts are connected.  They are connected not by plot but by a larger intent: to take us readers on an adventure; to show us readers that the isolated episodes of a life add up to something; to assure us that we are in safe hands even if a story pattern isn’t predictable.

Those intents are signaled to the reader right away.  Why does this matter for other novels?  It matters because timeless novels have a purpose that is larger than their plots, per se.  Their purpose is to show us more than the thin surface of a story.  It is to show us ourselves, the uneven patterns of our lives, the meaning that eludes us in the moment but that can become apparent over time, when we achieve a mature perspective.

Is your current WIP only as deep as its plot?  I’m pretty sure that you don’t want that to be the case.  You’d like it, I imagine, to tell us something about ourselves.  You’d like it to show us truths, explore our common condition, challenge us to think while assuring each of us that we are not alone.  You’d like it to mean more than the sum of it’s one hundred thousand-or-so words.  You’d like it to last.

If I’m right, then have a look at what your opening is signaling to us.  There is plot promise but there is also story promise.  Check the words.  Are they letting us know to expect adventure and an exploration of the way things are?  Are you letting us know that your subject is, among other, our common condition?  Are you showing us that you have your hands on the wheel and that we’ll love the wild ride that you are taking us on?

In Part II of this post, we’ll have a look at what happens after the opening in episodic novels: how the lively cast of characters each serve a purpose and how the discrete units of such novels each become necessary and achieve meaning.  Stay tuned.

What are your favorite novels that are episodic, picaresque, bildungsroman, coming-of-age, linked short stories, or otherwise not strictly and linearly narrative?