Story Structure in Omar el Akkad's What Strange Paradise

Reading like a writer, one of the things I appreciated most in el Akkad’s novel was its storyline, an interweaving of plot that unfolds in two times/spaces: Before and After. Before takes place mostly on the migrant boat Calypso, adrift on the Mediterranean Sea. After is a Greek island, with its uncomfortable mix of locals and tourists. The story moves back and forth from one to other, charging toward the moment in between.

The tension that burns in this book is cooking in both the Before and the After plot lines. They each feature a vulnerable main character who is in jeopardy and struggling for his life and freedom. As often happens in the real world, random bad luck has put Amir’s story in motion. He follows his stepfather, Quiet Uncle, to a market and is lured onto a migrant ship with the promise of a sightseeing tour. In fact, the ship is packed with illegal refugees heading toward Europe.

When Quiet Uncle discovers that Amir has boarded the boat, he pleads with the ship’s handlers to send the 8 year-old back to Alexandria.

“What difference does it make to you? He got on by accident.”

“Nobody got on by accident,” the man said. “We’re happy to pay his fare if you can’t, but then he’s not yours anymore. He’s ours, and we have a right to recoup our costs.”

So Quiet Uncle pays for a place for Amir on the upper deck using the remains of his cache of money.

El Akkad ratchets up the tension gradually but inexorably in both the Before and After storylines. We know, because After precedes Before in the book, that the ship capsizes and spreads its human cargo along the beach of a vacationer’s paradise. That only spurs on us further to find out just what happened.

I noticed that little events were all that was needed for readers to reach the grand and weighty ideas about justice, truth, morality. When the stakes are life and death, it is better to ground your scenes in the mundane and the trivial—peoples’ petty disputes and habits and comforts—or it will all feel too much.

What Strange Paradise was excruciating but never too much. In the After, the tension is just as high. Will Amir escape, or be caught? Here the conflict is not brought by confrontation with Nature (the mighty Sea) but so-called Civilization—sharpened to a lethal weapon in the hands of Colonel Kethros. Kethros will stop at nothing to catch the two children, for Amir has a local host and would-be saviour, Vanna.

In Colonel Kethros’ quest, he visits the director of a refugee camp to probe her for information about the missing children. Madame el Ward is in fact secretly helping Vanna to help Amir escape. She tells Kethros she’s too busy to be bothered by his missing kid; she’s managing a population of traumatized survivors, without proper support, and plenty of bureaucratic hurdles.

“We have children who can’t sleep though the night, we have people who don’t talk anymore, who try to slit their wrists with canned-food lids. This place is hell.”

“Hell? Really?”

Kethros shares a memory with her, from his days as a peacekeeper. The soldiers he worked with took bribes from their captives which increased with “inflation” once there was disparity and some people who could pay more than others. The lesson Kethros wants the director to take from his tale is that “inflation” has happened at her refugee camp too.

“…Now the going rate for suffering is higher. Now everyone has to claim they’ve been raped, tortured, their whole family wiped out, down to the pet dogs and the goldfish. Pretty soon they’ll be claiming they’re already dead….”

Colonel Kethros’ ugly logic—a kind of capitalist calculation, the “inflation” of suffering—of course assumes that it is only refugees playing this game of one-up-manship. They are the ones who need to impress with their suffering, they must use it, they must embellish, even lie, to try to cash in that suffering for freedom. To exit the Before and be granted an After.

Before/After turns out to be not just a structure for the novel’s story, but also its theme, as the title of the novel suggests. What is this, that comes after life? Paradise? Death? A second chance, or a dead end? What is the After in relation to the Before, and how much of what it is relies on what we presume it will be? At the limit, at the divide, what gets us from one thing to the other. Perhaps a fantasy, a preconceived idea. Perhaps it is (in)justice. Or else just physics and biology, an accident of Nature?

Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation: a study in minimalism of plot and character

I bought this book on a whim, mostly because I wanted a lighter read than what I had on my bookshelves, and also because I was intrigued by the cover art. I assigned an excerpt from Moshfegh’s novel to my college creative writing class, and many of them seemed eager to read it and happy to have encountered it on the syllabus. I must confess that I myself have found the whole experience of reading this book confusing and irritating. I didn’t enjoy what I was reading, the storyworld that I was inhabiting, or the characters I got to know. My opinion, it seems, is completely out of sync with the glowing reviews from articles like this one, in The New Yorker, and when that happens, you tend to wonder - am I just missing something, here? Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from My Year of Rest and Relaxation?

“I took a cab home, filled the new pre-scriptions and refilled the old ones at Rite Aid, bought a pack of Skittles, and went home and ate the Skittles and a few leftover primidone and went back to sleep.”

Spoiler alert! I’m going to be giving away the ending. Right now. Reva dies in one of the felled Twin Towers. The rest of the narrative leading up to that final page is occupied by the daily minutiae of the unnamed narrator’s year of deliberately doing nothing, in a privileged, mopey, purposefully obtuse kind of way. Reva is the narrator’s best friend, a superficial but seemingly more vulnerable young woman, who may or may not be trying to help her friend get out of her own head. The parents of these two young adult main characters all get killed off—some as backstory, and one in a minor subplot. Oh and there’s a hare-brained psychiatrist (“daily meditation has been shown to cure insomnia in rats”), whom I imagine as a sort of cartoon character since she is so implausible.

Regarding storyline. I was already of the opinion that a book need not be a plot-heavy or plot-twisty to sustain a reader’s interest. I had thought it required interesting characters in relationships. Moshfegh is apparently experimenting with the limits of plot and character minimalism here, perhaps to play with, and on, one of the novel’s main subjects: meaninglessness. It’s true that so little happens and moreover so little is actually thought about that by the time I reached the last page, the collapse of the twin towers and the death of Reva hit me with considerable force. This last-minute event also caused me to rethink the previous 288 pages and wonder: had they truly been that vapid and superficial and unredeemable? My Year of Rest and Relaxation also inspired me to consider how real-world events impact the reader’s relationship and feelings about characters.

I was pleasantly surprised, in fact, at the level to which my interest remained engaged in the book. I still don’t quite understand why. I can’t rule out that it had to do with anticipating having to teach on it, and to write this article. I also felt a certain level of incredulity, as a writer, that Moshfegh felt entitled to take up so much of my time as a reader with navel-gazing, shallow characters, and that incredulity motivated me to keep going. While my students seem to find the unnamed narrator “relatable” and “likeable”, I did not. Occasionally I wanted to slap her in the face and tell her to grow up, though most of the time felt like it wasn’t worth doing either. I know that says as much about me as it does about her; maybe I’m too old for cool cat irony.

So what would it be like to write a novel in which nothing happened? Would that be difficult? Liberating? Pointless? Arty? What would it be like to live a life in which nothing happened, and there was no point to it? What makes a life hold meaning and purpose, and does that depend on how you die? For all my irritation at spending time with these vain characters and their incontrovertible privilege, I applaud Moshfegh’s novel for provoking these questions. If you are already a literary media darling you might well risk boring and frustrating your readers in order to pursue the nature of oblivion, and that that too will come off as brilliant.

Inhabiting History in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes

“Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.”

Author Lawrence Hill lives in the city that neighbours mine. From about page 10 of The Book of Negroes I cultivated a fantasy of spotting him while I was out grocery shopping, or at the Home Depot, mustering up the courage to hail him from a safe social distance, and showering him with praise for his book. If he then accepted my invitation to grab a take out coffee, there are questions I would put to him, and aspects of craft that I would love to discuss. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from The Book of Negroes?

When writing about history, as a novelist, it’s so important for the storyline and characters not to be overwhelmed by the the author’s research and the actual historical context that serves as the setting and the impetus for the work more generally. Hill does a brilliant job of making history come to life through the experiences of the narrator and main character, Aminata Diallo. At no point did I feel as if the narrative was serving the historical truth rather than the other way around.

This was a compelling, page-turning experience for me, and precisely because of Aminata’s remarkable (her)story, which I understand to be an entirely plausibly portrayal of what it would have been like to be stolen into slavery and to live within its grip in some measure for the rest of your life. Hill’s work shows so powerfully that textbook history and critical history are no match for the power of creative writing to breathe life into the past and thereby help us truly understand it.

Another thing that I appreciated about The Book of Negroes was Hill’s decision to write it from the perspective of an elderly woman. Aminata’s expertise is as a midwife and a writer. Hill demonstrates that you can write convincingly of the experiences of people who are not the same sex, gender, profession, class, sexual persuasion, who are not of your own time, place or culture. (The book takes place mostly in the 18th century.) Yes, you can write convincingly in the voice and perspective of someone who is not at all like you. Just as, as readers, we can use our imaginations to inhabit those lives so dissimilar from our own. It is part of the magic and the pleasure and purpose of literature. If anyone tells you otherwise, or implies that such identity hopping is not correct or proper per se or needs some justification, ask them what else they think literature is about.

One of my questions for Hill is about the title of the novel. I appreciate the way it emphasizes the construction of the identity of Negro. Historically, there was an actual document called The Book of Negroes, which recorded the names and details of about 3,000 black men, women and children who sailed from New York City to various British colonies. They served or lived behind British lines during the American Revolutionary War and left as Black Loyalists. Hill’s novel contains this important event—both the documentation of the book and the departure of the Loyalists, their attempts to establish a new life in Nova Scotia. But Aminata’s story is much much longer and broader than her involvement in The Book of Negroes. So I do wonder how Hill arrived at choosing to replicate that title for his own title. How do you decide what to call your work?

In This Life We Lead: George Orwell's Coming Up for Air

Orwell’s classic was on the syllabus in one of my grad school courses, where we were assigned one novel a week to read. I don’t think I even cracked its cover that term. But I’m thankful I bought it and had it on my shelf to rediscover, years later. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I’ve learned from Coming Up for Air?

There are so many strengths to this work, but an obvious one is Orwell’s first-person narrator. George Bowling has an engaging and nerdy sort of self-awareness, and slips from one quirky commentary to another. He is a born storyteller, kind of a Cliff Claven, but with more depth. George spends the novel unspooling the tale of his own middle-age, wondering how he (and the rest of society) ended up where it is. This is London, 1938. An ominous time, and one that we think of now as quaint and innocent, positioned as it is before the bloodiest war in human history.

And yet the things that George Bowling misses and can never get back are the same sorts of things that any of us might long for from our childhoods. Simple, unadorned pleasures and the feeling of unbounded time. A world that made sense to us. A life where we were not enslaved to the “rat race”, a scheduled day, a repetitive commute, or the social expectations of a “progressive” lifestyle. A time when we had a waistline.

But let’s let Bowling speak for himself for a little. He’s just spent two chapters ruminating about fishing. Which you’d think would shade into boring, especially for someone like me who has no interest in it. Instead, I’ve been rapt. And then he takes his treasured experiences fishing and pitches them in the trash:

..[T]he other confession is that after I was sixteen I never fished again.

Why? Because that's how things happen. Because in this life we lead--I don't mean human life in general, I mean life in this particular age and this particular country--we don't do things we want to do. It isn't because we're always working. Even a farm hand or a Jew tailor isn't always working. It's because there's some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. There's time for everything except the things worth doing. Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and from on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories and reading the newspapers.

We might substitute a traffic light for a railway junction, or social media for a newspaper, but these words hit home. As a reader you’ve been patiently, pleasantly fishing along the shore of Bowling’s verdant memories. Then suddenly, dangling on your hook, is a truth about yourself and your own life and you’ve tugged it up and reeled it in before realizing that you now have to unhook the wriggling thing and put it out of its mercy. There is no way to throw any of this stuff back in the lake.

As you can read from the excerpt, the sentences Orwell uses (in the voice of George Bowling) are flat out powerful. They are not caught up in conveying, they simply convey. All use of wording, metaphor, and detail is precise and useful. Orwell’s writing as a journalist seems to impact this novel.

Personally, I also love that Orwell has tackled this subject matter. To be able to say something meaningful about the suburbs and the “ordinary” middle-class lifestyle is a talent. He does it by way of contrasting the world in which Bowling finds himself as an adult with the world in Bowling’s memory, the days of his life which had colour, and promise. When it had been possible to be a better person.

Perspective and Plausibility in Ian McEwan's Saturday

I wasn’t sure if was going to like this book. Having read it, I’m still not sure if I do. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I learned from Saturday?

I saw Ian McEwan being interviewed by Charlie Rose some years ago and the book piqued my interest at that time. The events of Saturday take place over a single day—an old motif in novel writing, one which structures such famous works as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s a readable, bounded, novel that you could probably accomplish in a Saturday, or a least a long weekend.

Digging in, what I found interesting was the narrator perspective McEwan chose: a third person point of view very tightly related throughout to the main character, neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. The perspective is so closely Perowne’s that I wondered what was gained by writing in third person rather than first. (Or what would have been lost, had he chosen first person?) Saturday makes it obvious, if you have any doubts about this, that you can employ a third person point of view narrator and achieve total intimacy with your character(s).

Speaking of characters, I found the characterization of Perowne’s wife unconvincing. In particular, the couple’s love life did not feel real to me and seemed more like, (to hazard a guess), a male fantasy of marital sex life, complete with bravado.

I also stumbled hard over a key moment in the plot. The break-in at Perowne’s home seemed out of place to me and an unnecessary, melodramatic, conclusion to the day. The character of Baxter, a thug with Huntington’s disease, likewise appeared staged and implausible. Was McEwan trying to forcibly relate absolutely everything in the book to neuroscience?

Although there were several brilliant moments when I felt the prose shine into me, Saturday seemed like an easy write. Perhaps this is testament to McEwan’s mastery of the form. Or perhaps he took the easier way out here. You can decide for yourself.

Journeying with Cormac McCarthy on The Road

I must admit I’d already watched the movie before cracking open this brilliant novel. I was horrified by the movie, in a good way; it’s a stunning film. The effect of McCarthy’s book on me was less chilling, more haunting. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I learned from The Road?

Sometimes it’s better to leave important things unexplained and unspoken. McCarthy has the confidence to leave certain major questions unanswered. Why is the Earth dead? What happened? How and why did human society descend into the anarchy that rules this vision and storyworld? These questions, which are immediate and pressing to the reader, are simply never answered here. This backstory is left undetermined. Though it seems by the physical details presented to us, (e.g., the ash, the lack of living species), that McCarthy knew that backstory for himself. In other words, he didn’t just cop out of telling it, he quite precisely left it off the table.

Why? Maybe because it’s not his business here to care about what happened, only to tell the story of those left after, of those who are trying to survive. It is unnecessary for us to know the catastrophe that caused this conflict, this fight for survival. It would distract us and occupy our time. And isn’t it even a little more unnerving to not know?

Make the most of structure. It’s not only in poetry that the structure and rhythm of a work impacts its meaning. In this novel McCarthy builds the plot and the storyline brick by brick. Rather than chapters, there are typically short sections of text—sometimes one line, sometimes a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages—interrupted by whitespace, that lead us onward.

These snippets of storytelling can read as aphorisms, condensed lessons, or even snapshots of lives in this precarious wilderness. The physical pattern the sections alternating with section breaks resembles footsteps, stages, or steps along a long road, mimicking and emphasizing the journey and the plot of The Road.

The effect is to draw the reader along bit by bit, chunk by chunk. The reader experiences fragments and makes associations to connect those fragments and experience an unfolding temporality. This is something readers do within any novel, it seems to me, yet here the abnormally large number of formal and physical caesurae emphasize the reader’s work of building associations, taking steps, forging ahead when one is invited to pause or break off. Quite cunningly, the reader is made to feel alone and thrown back upon herself.

Notice how the gaps also serve as transitions. When I began writing fiction I’d written argumentative essays for many years, and I was bedevilled by I what I felt as the difficulty of connecting events and aspects of the unfolding story I was writing. (When laying out an argument the connections are of course crucial to the overall plausibility of your thesis. I was still operating in essay mode.) Eventually I learned to give up on trying to forge connections for readers; readers will make them.

A writing instructor and novelist once told our class that he’d “spent all morning trying to figure out how to have a character recall something about his son,” eventually concocting something about the guy noticing a stain on his shirt and thereby having his memory jogged. Ridiculous! Just have the character think of his son. Just write that recollection where the work requires it to emerge.

If you have a huge vocabulary, wield it carefully. McCarthy is known for his enormous vocabulary and the precision of wording he employs. If there is a word for “that level of of wet sand under which the swell of the waves reaches”, and apparently there is, McCarthy will use it. (I forget the word, unfortunately! Suggestions?)

For someone like me, who enjoys words for words’ sake, it’s pleasing to encounter new and esoteric ones. It can feel jarring, though, to encounter such gems when they remove me temporarily from the storyworld. Who is the character who would choose the word “palimpsest” in a sentence while fleeing for his life? There may well be such a person, of course, but is he the character I know here? Or is the author hiding behind his character, egging him on, a thesaurus in hand?

I suppose there are different approaches to vocabulary in relation to voice and the merging and blending of author/narrator/character points of view. I tend to want to filter storyworld through the voices of particular, rooted, limited characters and be as plausible as possible in this effort. I want the reader to experience the storyworld as those characters do. How does it work for you? How do you make your vocabulary decisions?

An Art That's in the Details: Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests

“Now the vision she had had—the room, the freedom, the dizzying leap—it was in her head, small, small as a mustard seed, but taking root.”

— The Paying Guests

I happened to be reading this book when I made a trip to the dentist. The hygienist, when she came to collect me from the waiting room, spotted the huge hardcover in my hands and commented, “That’s a long book!” My impression was that she considered its thickness a point against it. I replied, “It’s an excellent book!” I didn’t bother to tell her that in addition to having an exhilarating experience as a reader, as a writer I was falling in love with Sarah Waters. The Paying Guests introduced me to her work; instantly, I felt a strong affinity to the ways she was making art. Reading as a writer, what are some of the things I learned from The Paying Guests?

Suspense and conflict have a place in literary fiction. I delighted in the fact that, in Waters’ hands, the most mundane plot is a page-turner, right from the beginning. How does that work exactly? Not by way of a ticking time bomb or the promise of high stakes drama or trauma. It’s through a subtle and sensitive use of detail. The richness of the inner life of this heroine, Frances, is conveyed via the precise and accurate use of detail, which enables us to experience nuances in her moods and shifts in her thinking. As readers we are ushered along, becoming more and more invested in Frances’ minor plans and hopes and worries. When life starts to fall apart in spectacularly big ways, those climactic events are anchored in the minutiae of Frances’ life, and have indeed arisen from it. I think it makes them all the more compelling.

Details are what allow us to inhabit others in intimate ways. Here, detail is employed in the service of intimacy. The Paying Guests has finely drawn characters with, we feel, lives of their own off the page and beyond the scenes in which they appear. Even if those lives are not remarkable, objectively, each of these characters understands themselves to be at the center of their own, unfolding story. (Just like we feel, as individuals.) Waters’ characters evince this sensibility and solidity.

Yet the narration (third person point of view) is mostly outward, by which I mean the narrator is not often observing or voicing Frances’ thoughts directly. Instead, we are looking through them, so to speak, utterly immersed in Frances’ world. It is through her perceptions, her attempts, the ways she negotiates this place and its people, that we develop a picture of who she is as well as a dynamic depiction of her external situation and circumstances. Notice how artful and efficient is this method of double-sided depiction.

Words are the brushstrokes that create details. The writing is so admirably fresh. Not because the words are particularly unusual or voluptuous. It’s the hair-trigger precision of the words and their unique associations and combinations that make Waters’ prose delicious. There is nothing showy here, for it’s about fit: the image, the analogy, the verb, that will carry the mood best, or evoke the moment in its fullest. In other words, page after page after page of hard work!

Her are some phrases and sentences, taken absolutely at random, to give you an idea of the persistent quality of Waters’ prose and the fine-grained nuances she achieves.

• “…her resolutions were peeling from her like bark from a tree.” (p. 132)

• “She felt another gust of loneliness.” (p. 135)

• “The glass was sticky in her hand.” (p. 138)

• “And when, with a smudge of discomfort, she thought of her mother in the room below, the thought had another feeling mixed up with it, something dark and unkind…” (p. 141)

• “With dragging feet, she left the last stretch of arid grass and started for home.” (p. 280) “She shook the idea off.” (p. 293)

• “He sat back, it seemed to Frances, as if not quite satisfied with what he’d heard, but with an air of patience, of calculation, of being prepared to accept it for now…” (p. 395).

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In this literary blog I review novels and other works of fiction, deconstructing and appreciating them from the perspective of craft, or how the writer is creating the work’s effects. I am “reading like a writer” to use author Francine Prose’s coinage, and I’m endebted to her wonderful book Reading Like a Writer for showing how much can be gained by this approach.