Reading 1Q84: The Case for Fiction in a Busy Life

Essays
November 14, 2011 | 2 books mentioned 27 6 min read

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coverWhen I was assigned to review 1Q84 for The Christian Science Monitor it had been four months since I’d read a page of anything. That last book I’d tried to read had also been by Haruki Murakami — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — and my bookmark was right where I’d left it, on page 52, the day my wife had gone into labor with our second son.

Raising young children poses two challenges for reading fiction. The first is time, and not having much of it. The second, which I find harder to overcome, is that raising kids and reading fiction require somewhat different mindsets: fiction opens you to new possibilities, but once you’ve embarked on an all-consuming activity like raising kids you don’t want to think too much about other possibilities; you just need to put your head down and do it.

I started 1Q84 at 9pm at the end of a long day that had featured a 103 degree fever (my youngest son Wally, age 4 months) and several bathroom accidents (his older brother Jay, age 2 years). As I slumped on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea and my large yellow review copy of 1Q84, I found myself grasping to justify why, outside of the assignment I’d been given, it made sense to spend my only free time of the day reading fiction.

But I did read the book, that night and every night after for a month, and I found that as I read 1Q84 and got deeper into Tengo’s and Aomame’s stories, I stopped questioning the purpose of fiction and instead began to see reading 1Q84 as one of the few necessary things I did all day. The reasons for the change of heart had to do with wonder, with love, and with the way literature provides for the best parts of who we are.

1Q84 is long (nearly 1,000 pages) and wildly imaginative, but at heart it’s a simple love story. Tengo and Aomame, both 30 years old, shared a singular, intense moment as children, disappeared from each other’s lives, and have been trying to recapture that kind of intimacy ever since. As 1Q84 opens they fall into an alternate world which is sinister and illogical, but which gives them the chance to find each other again.

Aomame calls this world 1Q84 (in which the “Q” stands for “question”) and it is most clearly distinguished by the fact that two moons hang in the sky — the familiar moon and, alongside it, a smaller moon, “slightly warped in shape, and green.” The moons preside over Aomame’s “sex feasts,” several murders, Tengo’s surreal trips to see his dying father, and one of the most transfixing nocturnal dream scenes I’ve ever read. The moons are a tangible reminder of the warning delivered to Aomame by her cab driver, just before she steps out of a taxi on a gridlocked Tokyo expressway and inadvertently into the world of 1Q84: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.”

A few days after I started reading 1Q84 I was standing in my Michigan backyard, talking on the phone with my brother, when the unusual brightness of the night caused me to look up at the moon — nearly full, unobstructed by clouds — for the first time in as long as I could remember. For a moment I was so taken by the view that I lost track of my brother, who was continuing to tell me about his weekend.

Afterwards I called Caroline out to the backyard. If it had been a while since I’d looked at the moon, it had been even longer since we’d looked at it together. We don’t have much time to stare up at the sky, and even if we did, the moon is outside our realm of concern. I have to care for my kids, earn a living, be a good husband. What difference is it to me if the moon is waxing or waning, full or crescent? For a few quiet minutes we looked up at it together before retreating inside from the cold.

Several of the most important scenes in 1Q84 take place in a playground atop a slide, where one at a time Aomame and Tengo (and a third character, the surprisingly heartbreaking private investigator Ushikawa) stare up at the sky.

The first time Tengo sits on the slide and notices the moons he thinks to himself, “No matter what happens to me in the future, this view with two moons hanging up there side by side will never — ever — seem ordinary and obvious to me.” The unordinary sight of the moons sets Tengo to wondering. He wonders, “What is going to happen to me from now on?” He also wonders about Aomame. “Someone is after Aomame,” he understands. “She’s hiding like a wounded Cat. I don’t have much time to find her.”

Reading about Tengo and seeing the moon in my backyard, it occurred to me that wonder gives us height, makes us consider new possibilities, motivates us not to linger where we are.

And it seems that reading 1Q84 pollinated my life with wonder in three ways. The first is that when Tengo wondered, I wondered alongside him. “What is going to happen to me from now on?” In a quiet house at night with two boys sleeping it feels like time stands still. Yet of course the drum keeps beating; somehow we move on.

1Q84 also inspires wonder through its beauty. “Her little pink ear pressed against his chest,” Murakami writes. “She was hearing everything that went on in his heart, like a person who can trace a map with his fingertip and conjure up vivid, living scenery.” Many nights I closed 1Q84 feeling hungry to go out and create something beautiful myself.

The last way that 1Q84 inspires wonder is the way that all great art inspires wonder: it mirrors life from a fresh angle. Murakami uses the world of 1Q84 to jog Aomame and Tengo into seeing their lives in a new light, and his novel had the same effect on me. One night, about halfway through 1Q84, my wife and I said goodnight to each other and turned to go to sleep. But before closing my eyes I propped myself back up on my elbow and looked intently at her face lying sideways on her pillow. There she was, old familiar Caroline. But for a moment she appeared as strange and wondrous as two moons in the sky.

1Q84 is not a book about wonder, though. It’s a book about love. For the three weeks I was reading it and all the days since, I’ve found myself thinking more consciously than usual about the importance of love — not as a fact that exists between two people — but as a feeling that puts a floor beneath our feet.

As Aomame and Tengo try to make their way towards each other and out of the world of 1Q84 what they’re really straining for is feeling. In their accustomed world of 1984 they might have gone on with their lonely lives but in the forbidding world of 1Q84, events and changes in their own hearts make stasis untenable.

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life,” Aomame tells her friend Ayumi. And in one particularly riveting scene (that would surely feature prominently in a 1Q84 trailer should the book be made into a movie) Aomame concludes that such encompassing love is not possible for her, so she takes to the side of the highway and puts the barrel of a pistol in her mouth.

1Q84 never drove to me to such depths, but it did help me recognize the difference between feeling and not feeling. The night after I finished the book I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Over the course of a month 1Q84 had become a part of my routine and the activities that had previously occupied my evening hours seemed unappealing in comparison.

So instead of mucking around on the Internet or folding laundry, I went upstairs to my two-year-old son Jay’s room and sat in a chair beside his crib. He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life. As I watched him breath in and out, all the cells in my body flooded with a feeling so grand that it crowded out all possibility of thought.

Later, after I’d left Jay’s room, I realized that while being a parent is tiring and sometimes boring, it also means that all I have to do is walk upstairs to experience a feeling that, like Aomame said, is akin to salvation. I also thought about all the hours I’d spent reading 1Q84, and suddenly it seemed clear why it had been a worthwhile way to spend my time: When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape.

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

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Essays

I Just Didn’t Like Her: Notes on Likeability in Fiction

Essays
November 11, 2014 | 2 books mentioned 30 10 min read
1. In high school I had a zine with my friend Vanessa. It included our poetry and short stories, and for the cover of the first issue we used a label maker to spell out its title.  After we'd put out one or two issues, I received a polite request from a man in prison, asking me to send him a copy. He paper-clipped two dollars in cash to his request. For some reason, I put the letter aside. From time to time, I took out the request, read it, and then put it back. Years later, I spent the money. To borrow a phrase from Bennie Salazar, the record producer in Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad, this is one of my "shame memories." Sometimes when I can't sleep, or when I'm having a particularly low day, I think about the guy in prison who wanted to read my zine, and I wonder why I never sent it to him, why I spent his two bucks on lip balm or a soda or whatever. What shames me the most is that there was no reason why I didn't send him the zine. I just...didn't. I had planned to, but something, perhaps the teenage trifecta of distraction, malaise, and self-absorption, held me back. I'm also ashamed that I think about this so much. As if my juvenile zine really mattered all that much to anyone. Lately, I've been thinking: If I were a fictional character, would readers hate me? 2. In her essay "Perfectly Flawed" Lionel Shriver writes, "Surely if fiction recorded the doings only of good campers who anguish about climate change and buy fair trade coffee, novels would be insufferably dull." I agree. As a reader, my only rule is that a character be interesting. I also have a taste for the quote-unquote unlikeable set: Eva Khatchadourian from Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin; Sheba and Barbara from Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal; Undine Spragg from Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country. I love that they're barbed, delusional, judgmental, thorny, damaged, and/or vulnerable. As Roxane Gay writes, "I want characters to think ugly thoughts and make ugly decisions. I want characters to make mistakes and put themselves first without apologizing for it." Every couple of months there's a new defense of unlikeable characters (see: Claire Messud's take) or likeable ones (see: Jennifer Weiner's), and this conversation often returns to our cultural expectations of women.  Recently, Emily Nussbaum wrote about "The Female Bad Fan" for The New Yorker. These are "the fans of shows with female protagonists, both comedies and dramas, who crave not bloodshed but empowerment." Nussbaum writes: The Mindy Project is a sitcom about a woman poisoned by rom-coms, but it offers up its own romantic-comedy pleasures. Female viewers, especially, have been trained to expect certain payoffs from romantic comedies, vicarious in nature: the meet-cute, the soul mate, and, in nearly every case, a “Me, too!” identification. Without “Me, too!,” some folks want a refund. I've come across something similar with my own novel, California, which is marketed as a literary post-apocalyptic novel, but is also a study of a young marriage. While many readers tell me they like the wife, Frida, many do not. Readers on Goodreads or Amazon have expressed this opinion, but so have a couple critics: in the Washington Post, for instance, Sara Sklaroff remarked that Frida "isn’t much of a heroine. She’s annoying, self-centered and tragically naive." I was surprised that Sklaroff hated Frida as much as she did, and even more puzzled that she didn't also have trouble with Cal, Frida's husband; to me, they're both flawed.  I was surprised, too, that character likability was a central focus of the review. 3. To be honest, the negative reactions to Frida have given me a wee bit of a complex. I've found myself wondering about my own actions, about the way I've hurt this or that person, or felt slighted about some insignificant thing someone said to me. The way, in college, I asked, "What's with the hat?" to a Mennonite at the movies. The shame memories are running on repeat these days, is what I'm saying. Frida isn't like me: she is impetuous and secretive, she acts based on emotion and intuition, and she's a slacker. Cal isn't like me either: he is more hesitant, reserved, and adaptable than I am. These characters frustrated and disappointed me, but I always found them compelling. Likability wasn't part of the equation; I simply wanted to write about these two specific people, alone and together in the woods, mourning their pasts and trying to stay hopeful. If anything, I was interested in setting a small-scale drama within an "end-of-the-world" situation. What if, at the end of the world, we aren't our best selves--we're just ourselves? (This summer I read The Hunger Games and though I'd love to be as brave as Katniss, I doubt I would be. Maybe the post-apocalyptic genre has trained us to expect characters to break free from the shackles of pettiness and resentment and grief in the face of world-ruin. I'm interested in the characters who don't or can't do that.) 4. I decided to ask two fellow writers about their experience with the "unlikeable" issue. Jean Hanff Korelitz told me that by the time her new novel, You Should Have Known, came out in March, readers' dislike for her protagonists had "risen to a general din...even from readers who liked the novel very much."  She went on: 'I just didn’t like her' is a phrase I read over and over again on Goodreads and Amazon, about the protagonist, Grace Sachs (a woman who has so many problems -- missing, probable murderer and adulterer husband, exploding career, global humiliation, etc.-- that reader reviews would be pretty far down on the list). The whole phenomenon made me take stock of the female characters I’ve gravitated to over the years: Lizzie Bennet? Becky Sharp? The strange, probably mentally ill narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping? Would I truly have wanted to take a spa weekend with any of them? When had that become a requirement for appreciating a fictional character? When I asked Jean what's on her mind as she creates a character, she said, "I seem to have this compulsion to take women who appear strong, fortunate, “self-actualized,” and rip them to shreds, then see what they make of themselves after that, how they claw their way back." She continued: I think there’s an essential feminism at work here...not that I am in the habit of quoting Therese Giudice (she of the indelible “ingredientses” for the cookbooks she -- God help us -- writes), but her most recent Real Housewives tagline -- “You never know how strong you are until it’s the only choice you have...”--could serve the protagonists of most of my novels. Women really are strong when they have to be. And that, to me, is far more compelling than finding your “bestie” in the pages of a novel. Since receiving Jean's words of wisdom, I've been thinking a lot about what I want to see in fictional characters, no matter the gender: I want them complex and realistic, and also surprising. And for female characters, it's particularly important to me that they have the freedom to be whatever they need to be, whether it's strong, or weak, or ice-cold, or vulnerable, or all of the above. After all, my real-life best friend can be all of those things, and I still love her. Author Emma Straub helped me put this all in perspective. A small contingent of readers don't seem to like her character Franny, who is the matriarch of Emma's novel The Vacationers. (Which is weird to me, as Franny is funny, an excellent cook, and she's being pretty pleasant in the wake of her husband's infidelity.) Emma is wonderfully sanguine about the issue: I certainly never intended to make my characters either likable or unlikeable — my goal with the characters in this book was to make them as real as possible. Warts and all. I always liked them, but I don’t think that’s even the point. I wasn’t surprised when some readers didn’t, because I saw them as three-dimensional human beings, and god knows it’s hard to find one of those that you don’t find in some way lacking or imperfect. I truly could not care less if readers feel differently. I also think there’s a big difference between a character being unlikeable (whatever that means) and it being unpleasant to spend time reading about them. I have put down many books because I didn’t like the experience of reading them, but that has nothing at all to do with whether or not the characters in those books seemed like people I would want to hang out with. That’s my question, I suppose, for the people who keep bringing this horseshit up. Are they complaining about not enjoying the book, or that they don’t want to have tea with the characters? Because if it’s the former, for godssake, stop reading! I grew up in a house built on horror novels, so I’ve spent my entire life reading books about serial killers and pedophiles and assorted other creeps. Are those unlikeable characters? To some people, probably. 5. Traditionally, the Unlikeable Character in fiction is created with authorial intention. You, as the reader, recognize the cues that the person you're reading about is alienating or reprehensible, and it's clear that such characterization is part of author's aesthetic project. (Unreliable Characters, a la the infamous butler in Remains of the Day, are also traditionally revealed this way). But what if a character isn't Unlikeable, but unlikeable?  What if you just didn't like him or her? That's a valid personal response, and certainly a good a reason as any to stop reading.  But it's such a personal response that it's irrelevant to the critical gaze. 6. Part of me is embarrassed that I unintentionally wrote characters that are so insufferable--at least to some readers. It's like holding a glass up to a door, behind which strangers are describing how terrible you--or worse, your children!--are. I can't help but keep eavesdropping. At the same time that I emailed Jean and Emma, I also sought out readers who couldn't stand Frida. This was part anthropological experiment, part focus group. I felt like, if I could just get some answers, I might understand my own book a little better. I stumbled upon Susan's review on Goodreads. In it, she details how much she couldn't stand any of the characters in California. It's a very funny rant, which begins, "I don't remember ever before reading a book where I so hated all of the pieces yet so very much enjoyed the book as a whole." When I asked Susan when exactly her antipathy began, she told me, "I actually disliked Frida from almost the first page. She immediately seemed crass and spoiled to me." In the first scene, the reader learns that Frida treasures a turkey baster, purchased before leaving Los Angeles, which even Cal doesn't know she possesses. Susan said, "The turkey baster was so bizarre... I got what it was about, but the fact that it was so frivolous and silly, combined with the fact that the very first thing I learned about her was that she was keeping secrets (STUPID secrets!) from her husband just turned me off." Susan's reactions fascinated me. One, that frivolity would be damning, rather than revealing, or that a reader would require a secret be grave, especially when it's between a husband and wife. I'm reminded of the time someone told me they hate to dance, as in, they never ever feel the urge to move to music, even when alone. Wow, I thought, people sure are different from me! (Susan also hated that Frida "seemed to be entirely defined by the men in her life." I hate that, too.) Susan had some choice words for Cal: "The truth is, I actually hated Cal more than Frida. I thought he was a pompous pseudo-intellectual hipster ass." Sheesh, Susan, tell me how you really feel! Generally, she interpreted Cal and Frida through the lens of their white privilege. That interpretative model poses a powerful question about characterization: how much is our identity, and our actions, dictated by race and class? But, then again, if a reader traces everything about Frida and Cal back to their white privilege, that means I've failed, in some way, to make them fully human. It also might suggest that there's a lower tolerance for white privilege in the post-apocalyptic landscape; some readers want the end-of-the-world to slough off such burdens. (To me, Frida and Cal are victims of late-capitalism, and also products of it. Aren't we all.) Another reader, Shayna, answered my call on Tumblr for anyone who hated Frida. She said she was bothered by Frida's decision to take a Vicodin while pregnant. And, again, she took issue with Frida withholding information, especially from Cal. She wrote, "I just found this so stupid and selfish."  It's true, Frida does some pretty stupid and selfish stuff, as does Cal. I suppose, as a writer, I'm interested in the stupid, selfish choices we make. 7. Hearing from Shayna and Susan brought me some peace, for I can't control how people react, nor should I want to. I am honored that my novel elicited strong reactions to my characters, and I'm  heartened that both readers enjoyed the book despite (or because of!) these reactions. Both agreed that there's often a double-standard for female characters. Shayna said, "A women is whiny or bitchy and ruins the story whereas a male is mean or surly and [that] just makes him interesting or an anti-hero." Susan said,  "I am a huge, huge fan of Gillian Flynn, the primary reason being that she's not afraid to write female characters who are evil, psychotic, violent, and messed up in every possible way.  I find that so much more empowering and compelling as a female reader to hear about those women than about the perfect, nice, likeable, and usually totally unrealistic female characters you find in most novels." Susan's tastes align with mine, and with many other readers'. Right now there are so many complex female characters for us to encounter on the page and screen, particularly quote-unquote unlikable ones, from Amy Elliott-Dunne of Gone Girl, to the (less murderous) Hannah Horvath of Girls.  I, for one, can't turn away from these women, and I won't. I won't turn away from the characters who stem from my own dark, muddy mind, either. Image via amysjoy/Flickr
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 30 10 min read
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27 comments:

  1. Pingback: Reading fiction, raising kids | Growing Sideways

  2. Lovely reminder. Fiction feeds us. Your reflection reminds me of Agatha Christie’s lament that “if I sit down and read a novel after breakfast I have a feeling of guilt.” But your essay says go ahead. Read a novel after breakfast. Or late at night. Or whenever. The main thing? Read. Thank you.

  3. You’ve captured this beautifully. I’m about 1/3 of the way through 1Q84, reading it in small doses each night as the house settles down and goes quiet, and, for the first time in a long while, feel as if I’m as on the trail of something BIG as Tengo and Aomame…

  4. Thank you for this beautiful review, this is how Murakami makes me feel too. My husband bought me a copy of IQ84, knowing I love the writer and it has sat expectantly on by bedside waiting to be read for a couple of weeks now while life keeps me busy… After your review, I am determined to settle in with it as soon as I get home tonight.

  5. I haven´t read this Murakami´s book yet, but reading your essay filled me with such a joy… I fully get your point – you have expressed the feeling of a passionate reader when reading a great book – thank you for that.

  6. Pingback: On how great fiction makes us more human « wish i were somewhere else

  7. Have been reading the book (Traditional Chinese translation) since more than half a year ago but the thirst to know what would actually happen kept me reading on. 1/3 more to go and I shall finish it before 2011 does! Murakami never fails to trigger the reader to think about what is racing through the minds of the characters he portrayed, offering new perspectives to us at the same time. 1Q84 really pushed this limit to the maximum with the somewhat bizzare storyline.

  8. Pingback: Review: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami « Roaming Olivia

  9. Kevin, this piece of writing is gorgeous, with fantastic insights into the book, and fiction-reading generally.

    I finished 1Q84 4 days ago. I was deflated after reading Janet Maslin’s review of it in the New York Times. It seemed to me she was sneering at bits and pieces of the book she found confounding, and made no attempt to understand that the beauty of the book is its theme of love’s power to shift one’s world right off its axis. You capture Tengo and Aomame’s world-shifting love very well. So, thanks and admiration. Are you on Twitter?!

    And by the way, no spoilers but I found the end of the book VERY satisfying, which after 925 pages, I was grateful for!

  10. Thank you so much, Barbara, and all the other commenters for the kind words! And I am on Twitter (@kshartnett).

  11. Thank you for the beautiful review and the evocation of that intense and mysterious experience of being-in-a-book.

  12. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    This is absolutely beautiful. In these two sentences, I get a real glimpse of what parenthood must be like.

    And, overall, a great essay! I never quite understand why I spend so much time reading fiction until I do it and realize that it’s the most important thing in the world.

  13. very lovely article, sir. i am so glad you shared with us your feeling about reading the book and the connection it brought out between you and your family.

  14. This is a wonderful essay, which brought back fond memories of what it was like to be engulfed and swept away by John Williams’ “Stoner” after reading a review (I think the New York Times) declaring it was a “perfect novel” (and pretty much agreeing with that sentiment). The best books truly allow you to live in and be alive inside them … and once read, they live inside of you. But as the father of a 2-and-a-half year old … well, do I need to say more?

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  19. Really inspiring review. I’ve read a number of1Q84 reviews and this review really hits the spot in terms of what the reader comes away with during, and after the read. Many readers don’t want to read a blow by blow plot summary. I appreciate understanding the complexity of the yearnings of the heart, empathy (as well as the existential ‘atlas shrugged’ nature of mankind) and all the lessons one takes away from having experienced a piece of fiction as part of their own lives.

  20. Literature is an island of sanity. We can’t be who we really are without it.

    103 is a temperature to weep over. Hope the baby is having a happy day today.

  21. You make a great case for fiction and argue its necessity so eloquently. 1Q84 is a tome and no small feat (not unlike Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which I have bookmarked 10 pages from the end). However, the hardcover is gorgeously designed and that alone makes me want to purchase a copy. I’m not a fan of Murakami, but your review encourages me to take a second look and grab a copy of 1Q84. Who can resist a love story, after all? Especially one with such day-to-day resonance!

  22. Pingback: Monday Snax « Little Stories

  23. “He was lying flat on his stomach with his hands beneath his body and his head tucked into a corner of his crib. Even asleep, he seemed to glow with life.”

    “Then he farted”

    If your life is anything like mine, which I suspect it isn’t.

    Seriously though, what a lovely review. Many thanks.

  25. Pingback: reading to fulfill « Book of The Sacred Rung

  26. I have just finished the book and your essay perfectly captures the feeling I felt while reading it. This was my first Murakami novel so although I expected the fantastical elements I hadn’t expected how he uses them to highlight human emotion and most of all, love. My favourite quote:

    “It’s like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn’t move.”

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Essays

A Multiplicity of Voices: On the Polyphonic Novel

Essays
February 15, 2013 | 2 books mentioned 28 6 min read
Reared in the dressing rooms of the 18th century, the novel can often seem out of place in our age of LOLcats and Angry Birds. But in spite of its advanced age and sometimes stuffy reputation, the old chap is surprisingly nimble. In the technological tumult of the past decade, for example, YA went through puberty, electric literature moved out of the ivory tower, and the literary novel was successfully (for the most part) cross-pollinated with a number of more exotic genres. In the midst of all this, a strange literary beast has reemerged, a hybrid of the short story and traditional novel. This newly reinvigorated genre -- let’s call it the polyphonic novel -- uses a chorus of voices and narrative styles to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Think Nicole Krauss’s Great House or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad or Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. Just as polyphonic music combines melodies to create texture and tension, the polyphonic novel collects a multiplicity of distinct, often conflicting voices around a single place, family, object, or idea. Polyphony widens the novel’s geographic, psychological, chronological, and stylistic range, while simultaneously focusing its gaze. Drawing inspiration from classics like The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, and John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, contemporary polyphonic novels make music from the messy cacophony that is life in the 21st century. Bypassing traditional notions of character and plot, polyphonic novels create meaning at the intersection of seemingly random plot lines. Harmonies are found in the artful assemblage of disparate voices. As the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin described the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky: “A plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.” Eschewing objectivity and uniformity, polyphonic novels rely instead on simultaneity, contradiction, and the empty space between voices. Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, NW, is a perfect example of the genre. The book traces four Londoners as they attempt to understand, escape, and make their way through Kilburn, the working-class neighborhood where they all grew up. With each new narrator, the novel loops back on itself, answering and expanding upon questions raised by previous sections. Towards the beginning of the book, for example, one of the main characters watches her best friend and her best friend’s husband exchange a glace across a crowded party. “She sees no smile, no nod, no wave, no recognition, no communication, nothing at all.” Two hundred pages later, we have begun to understand the glance in all its sad complexity. The seemingly enviable couple is really nothing but “an advert for themselves,” “like a double act that only speaks to each other when they are on stage.” Polyphony is particularly well-suited to excavations of the urban landscape. (For what is a city if not a collection of conflicting voices?) In Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann mobilizes a chorus of seemingly incongruous voices to conjure a portrait of New York in the 1970s. Skipping between narrators -- an aging prostitute, an Irish monk, a judge, and an irresponsible young artist, to name just a few -- McCann creates a dissonant, yet synchronistic world nearly as vivid and wonderfully cluttered as the city itself. But polyphonic novels need not live in the city. Take, for example, Hari Kunzru’s brilliant Gods Without Men, which layers the Mojave desert with a progression of characters searching for meaning in the void. Narrators pop up and fade away. They build doomsday bunkers, military bases, and geodesic domes. They spend decades looking for truth, but the quiet mystery of the desert subsumes them all. As the final narrator writes, “that which is infinite is known only to itself and cannot be contained in the mind of man.” Contemporary polyphonic novels come in a wide variety of flavors. Many find structure in the family. Others, like The Imperfectionists, are shaped around the extended family of the workplace. Ian McEwan’s Atonement centers around a single act of accusation. While Great House and Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book follow a single object through history, dipping in and out of the lives of those who have possessed it. And then there are those polyphonic novels built on nothing more than an idea. Swirling around seemingly unapproachable concepts such as authorship and fictionality, aging and time, novels like Cloud Atlas and A Visit From the Goon Squad use a variety of forms and styles to create a sense of scope that would be difficult (if not impossible) to achieve with a single narrator. It can be hard sometimes to tell the difference between these most disparate polyphonic novels and linked short story collections like Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge or Emma Donoghue’s Astray. Often, unfortunately, this border is delineated by marketing departments eager to attract readers (who, as conventional wisdom would have it, are drawn like moths to those two tiny words, “a novel,” tucked away at the bottom of the book cover). As Jay McInerney grumbled in a recent review: “I suspect that if Dubliners had been published in recent years it would have been marketed as a novel.” Whether or not his assessment is true, many readers agree with McInerney’s basic premise. Indeed, a quick perusal of Goodreads reveals a sizable cadre of those frustrated by polyphonic novels’ lack of traditional plot and character development. As one reviewer on the Great House page wrote: “writing a book of short stories, fitting them together Tetris-like, and calling it a novel DOES NOT MAKE YOUR BOOK A NOVEL.” Even some professional critics seem flummoxed by polyphony (see, for example, Douglas Copeland on Gods Without Men or Mike Peed on Let the Great World Spin). While certain readers and critics might be frustrated by shifting genre boundaries and non-linearity, the polyphonic novel has found favor among those responsible for giving out literary awards. Almost all of the books mentioned above have won (or should win) major literary prizes. The finalists for the past decade of Pulitzers, Bookers, and National Book Awards include quite a few works that could be described as polyphonic. This might be a coincidence, or a peculiar bias of the awards’ judges. Regardless, these awards indicate that the polyphonic novel occupies an important sector of the contemporary literary landscape. With each foray onto the Internet, each ping and clang, we are searching for meaning in a haystack of data, balancing perspectives, trying to find reason in a cacophony of opinion. Is it any wonder we are drawn to fiction that reflects this new way of being, to a form that’s uniquely suited to our fragmented and globalized century? The novel survived the advent of radio, cinema, and television, thanks in large part to its pliability. And the novel will continue to survive so long as it continues to adapt.
Essays
| 2 books mentioned 28 6 min read
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