That Keep a Reader Reading

Alice Mattison | February 2011

NOTES

Not long ago I found myself reading several incomplete novels by able new writers. I liked their sentences, their diction. Their subject matter was intriguing. Nonetheless, as I read I found myself frustrated, looking for excuses to put the books down. I got mixed up and bored; I didn't care enough. It seemed that the writers had thought up incident after incident concerning their characters and had written them down in no particular order. Episodes were interesting, but I didn't know why they were there. They jumped around in time for no reason I could see, nor did I have any confidence that they'd ever stop jumping around in time. Many pages from the beginning, I still didn't know what mattered and what didn't.

Writing whatever comes to mind, I know, isn't a bad way to begin a first draft of a novel, and we often hear that fine novels began just that way. We don't write good novels without touching on painful subjects, and many of us need to write for a long time before those painful thoughts emerge from wherever we ordinarily hide them. Writing without a plan, we make discoveries. And then, with luck, a compelling story forms itself under our typing fingers.

But what if we don't have that luck? The authors of the books I was reading didn't know what to do if they never received an inspirational flash that would make their pages behave like a novel. Moreover, writing-sometimes for hundreds of pages-without direction, these beginning novelists ran out of material. When we write a scene on page 200 of a novel, we use what we may have known all along about a character's quirks and passions, but we know what he or she is doing because what's happening is partly a consequence of events on pages 100, 150, and 180. If writers write too long at random, they bore even themselves. Would-be novelists with a heap of pages need to know how to stop and impose some kind of structure on what is there, however loose: to organize the events that are already written down-or think up new ones-so they keep a reader involved. If we consider what we want when we read a novel, and examine the structure of some good books, it becomes clearer how writers may shape even meandering, messy stories so we want to keep reading.

Whatever else we desire from a novel, we require some sense of a direction, even if the book may seem disorganized. We think of a novel as moving from beginning to end, not end to beginning. We think of it as a road, not a meadow, though it may have a proliferation of side stories, digressions, and descriptions-detours, alternate routes, and rest stops-within it. It is different from a collection of connected stories, which may be thought of as a group of routes that intersect, like the New York City subway system, or that take off from a center, like the T in Boston. Stories can usually be read out of order, but you'd better not start with chapter five of a novel. Can we agree that a novel (leaving aside some experimental fiction) needs forward motion, that readers require something to persuade them to read in a direction and to keep reading, instead of picking the book up and reading at random here and there, or stopping in the middle?

Most often, the parts of a novel lead us along because the first event causes the second event, and so forth. And when we start thinking about an event leading to another event, we are thinking about plot-which, you'll have guessed, is one thing the unfinished novels I was reading lacked. Indeed, the presence of causality is what E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, says distinguishes plot from story. I first read Forster's pronouncement many years ago, and could make no sense of it. "Let us define a plot," he says. "We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. 'The king died and then the queen died' is a story. 'The king died and then the queen died of grief' is a plot."1 For years, I tried to make sense of that dead queen, and I still find the sentence baffling without something Forster says later. I understand why it's not a plot to say that the king died and then the queen died. It's an event and then another unrelated event, comparable to a hurricane followed by an election.

But I don't see why it makes a difference if the poor queen died of grief, or, to continue the analogy, if the government's inadequate response to the hurricane affects the outcome of the election. The first event, all by itself-the death of the king or the hurricane-does not raise questions about the queen or the election. The road here would seem to run backwards: it's not until the queen dies that we start thinking about whether her death may have resulted from the death of the king, and it's not until the campaign begins that we are asked by a candidate to think back to the hurricane and the government's response.

But Forster is not done with his dead royals. He says, "Or again: 'The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered it was through grief at the death of the king.' This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development."2 Later he says that "mystery is essential"3 to a plot and I think he is right, even though mysteries in fiction may be quite simple: "Will he forgive her?" "Can she overcome her doubts and marry him?" or just, "Are things ever going to improve here?"

Now I do understand. "The queen died, no one knew why" sets a plot in motion because the people around the queen are mystified from the beginning-and the presence of the plot is also what gives the story forward movement: we start with the death of the queen and keep reading to find out what killed her. The novel might begin with her sickness and then look back at the past as a detective story does, with the detective trying to figure out what happened before he came on the scene. Or, if the novel did begin with the death of the king, somebody would say, early on, "I'm worried about what this will do to the queen." Similarly, a novel about an election campaign that's affected by a hurricane might begin with the campaign and present the hurricane in flashback, or, if the government's response to the hurricane makes people think and talk about the government and the next election while water is still lapping at their feet-as happened with Hurricane Katrina-then the hurricane can make us curious about the election. Our interest in the first event will carry us toward the second one if the author gives the reader some help, some hint of direction.

Some of the shapeless novels-in-progress I saw did take the form "The king died and the queen died of grief," but lacked that help. I might read a long account of the death of the king, but I didn't know why I was reading it until the queen finally got around to her annual physical on page 110. A plot worthy of the name needs to push us forward, not just to be worth reading in retrospect. Chekhov said that if a gun is mentioned in the first act, it must go off in the third. If the shooting of the gun is to be an effective plot element in the third act, the gun probably should be mentioned in the first.

Now that I think I understand him, I like Forster's definition of plot, or the one he seems to arrive at when he explains all he means by "The king died and the queen died of grief." I think he means that this bit of information is the basis for a plot, enough for a plot, and when organized so as to make the reader wonder what will follow from the king's death, it is a plot. Can we say then that a plot is a series of events arranged in a way to arouse enough curiosity to carry us through a story? But because events aren't the only sources of curiosity, if we're to understand what keeps us reading novels, we must discuss more than plot. This essay will concern itself with whatever makes us curious, whatever provides forward momentum-acknowledging that an elaborate, dramatic plot-or a simple but compelling plot-is the customary way of keeping us involved. Others include form that tantalizes us with the promise of repetition, variation, and resolution; partial revelation of what's coming-hints and foreshadowing-and signals of emotional shifts like "She became uneasy" or "She changed her mind: she would try to stop him." Sentences like those don't bring the term "plot" to mind, but may have the same use in a book as an elaborate structure of action, coincidence, chance, and vengeance, in which each event leads to another event. What makes us feel anticipation may be any of these.

Whatever it is, its placement matters. When I speak of what makes us curious I assume that the writer is aware of the reader, at least dimly, and that deciding what to write next-what sentence or what scene-partly has to do with keeping the reader curious. As we read a good novel-or any narrative-we can identify sentences, bits of dialogue, or events that keep us interested. And often, simple reminders that somebody is keeping track-that somewhere there's an author, and the author, at least, thinks we're moving in a direction-give us all the reassurance we need to keep paying attention. When a friend tells us a story, a sentence like, "Bear with me, I'm telling you this for a reason" can make us willing to sit through a long digression. Words like "But to understand why the day was a disaster, you need to know something about my brother's past" can transform what may seem random information into something that feels purposeful, and unless we have learned that this particular story-teller promises more than she delivers, such a sentence makes us trust her. Like Wallace Stevens's jar in Tennessee that "made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill..."4 the unremarkable statement transforms the rest of what's there into something that's no longer haphazard.

Everyone remembers the outline of Moby-Dick.5 A man who tells us to call him Ishmael signs up as a sailor on a whaling voyage departing from New Bedford, Massachusetts. The one-legged captain turns out to be obsessed with finding and killing a white whale, Moby Dick, who tore off his leg in a previous battle. Most of the crew becomes equally invested in this quest, and the ship, the Pequod, travels for several years until it meets Moby Dick, who destroys the ship and everyone in it except Ishmael. I first read Moby-Dick many years ago, and when I began rereading it recently, I assumed there would be several subplots I had forgotten, but no, this book asks one question near the beginning-Where the hell is that whale?-and churns forward for hundreds of pages until the question is answered. A diagram of the story would consist of a single road prominently posted with "One Way" signs.

Of course, there is more to it than that, and there is much more to all the novels I'll discuss than whatever makes us curious. We may be as curious as can be, but if the writing is trite and the characters aren't psychologically complex, a book may be fun to read, but trashy. What makes a novel good or great is usually not what keeps the reader curious; it's just that without something to make the reader curious, a novel isn't a novel. A cardboard container has little value by itself, but without it a cup of coffee is a puddle on the floor. Ishmael is an engaging character who talks directly to the reader and goes into much more lively, passionate detail than would be necessary simply to tell the story. Here he is, near the beginning, explaining why he went on a whaling voyage. Melville awakens our curiosity by describing Ishmael's curiosity:

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (here he means the species, not the individual, not yet Moby Dick). Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it-would they let me-since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.6

Part of what's appealing about Moby-Dick is Ishmael's friendly but elevated, self-involved, slightly quirky narration, and his language. Then there's our sense that the whale is more than a whale. The story is as much about evil and the scary human wish to approach it-the lure of the forbidden-as it is about whaling and the sea. The feeling that everything in the book matters in at least two ways makes it exciting to read even when the story sags.
The story does sag. It's full of digressions about whaling and whales, quirky essays on such topics as "The Sperm Whale's Head" and "The Right Whale's Head," which seem charming to some readers and tedious to others. Overriding each interruption, always remaining in our minds, is, to be sure, the unrelenting question of the book-Where's the whale, where's the whale? But the digressions don't move the story along, and some people skip them. If the book as a whole is a wide, straight road, the digressions are cul de sacs, and like the UPS driver who must turn down each of these dead ends, as a reader you may keep in mind the speed and movement of the road, but often as not you aren't on it. The novel does not have subplots-secondary chains of events-but it does have self-contained dramas that are compelling in their own right: the occasions when the Pequod encounters a whale that's not Moby Dick, or another ship. Some of the officers and crew have personalities and passions of their own, and we come to care about them, but their actions don't alter the main action of the book, the obsessive movement toward the white whale.

Not many novels-except maybe detective stories-have a source of forward momentum that's as clearly stated and simple as Moby-Dick, and unlike a detective story, the account of looking for the whale doesn't have much intricacy-there are no false sightings, frustrating delays, or clues that come to nothing. If it didn't offer more than its simple story, it wouldn't be very good. What makes it great is the convincing horror of Ahab's obsession, the boldness of the novel's reach and its intensity, the richness and plenitude of its descriptions, and the way details about the whale and the sea suggest at all times something even larger than the sea, which Melville doesn't specify or moralize about, so it remains powerful and mysterious. At the end when he quotes the book of Job-"and I only am escaped alone to tell thee," 7 the implied claim that he's writing about events that are beyond ordinary experience feels justified.

Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain is another book that's more compelling than one would think from a description.8 In relentless detail, it's the account of Hans Castorp's sojourn at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Alps, first as a visitor, then as a patient: he comes for three weeks-which are narrated hour by hour over the first quarter of the book; that is, for more than two hundred pages-and he stays for seven years. One of Mann's preoccupations is time and what it's like, how quickly it passes when nothing is going on, and how-as he demonstrates in his book-it changes shape, so a year and an hour can take the same number of words to narrate, depending on how time feels. Mann plays with this idea until the reader is as curious about how he'll break up and stretch out time as about anything else. The book tells a story in which, in large terms, nothing happens: Hans Castorp is removed from life, and does almost nothing but eat (they eat five meals a day in the sanatorium), take walks, and lie on a chair on his balcony, wrapped in blankets when it's cold, as it usually is. But in this slow, solemn recitation, the events that do occur become as exciting as more dramatic ones in a more dramatic book (and the book eventually includes an episode when Hans Castorp is lost on skis in the snow, a duel, and a couple of suicides). Though Mann is writing what often amounts to an exposition of certain ideas-the characters argue, and the symbolic power of the book speaks to the argument-he also uses devices to secure the reader's attention that any novelist might use.

Throughout the first quarter of the book, we guess that Castorp will be diagnosed as tubercular and become a patient instead of a visitor, and we wait with growing anticipation for him to discover that, by the standards of the doctors in this place (who think everyone is sick) he too is sick. When he finally takes his temperature, the seven minutes in which he keeps the thermometer in his mouth are acutely suspenseful. By the time he is diagnosed, he's in love with one of the patients, and we wait for them to look at each other, pass each other in a corridor-and-eventually-speak. She leaves, after they have spent one night as lovers, but now there are other issues-and eventually she comes back.

This is what's called a novel of ideas, but whether a character will understand an idea can be as suspenseful as anything else. Much of this book consists of Hans Castorp listening to two other characters, an Italian humanist and an authoritarian Jesuit, argue about the spirit and the body-life and death. Foolish Hans Castorp insists both men are equally interesting, and the reader frets over him. The sanatorium, we gradually come to feel, represents death, and the Jesuit represents death-the denial of the value of human life-and we are desperate to know whether Castorp will ever come to his senses and see what we see.

Reading the accounts of Castorp's activities feels almost as long as the real incidents would take, but you always know you're moving through time, and the sense of time passing without our ability to control it is a powerful way to keep a reader involved. The book is organized into a series of uncertainties, each one keeping us interested at least until we come to the next, sometimes because of the way Mann tells us about them. When the woman Hans Castorp loves returns to the sanatorium, she's accompanied by a man named Peeperkorn, a compelling personality who lives to eat and drink and enjoy the world of the body, but whose thoughts and words make no sense. Hans Castorp is even more enthralled with him-though he and Peeperkorn are rivals for the woman-than with the humanist and the man of God who have been struggling for his attention. Then, writing of Peeperkorn, the narrator mentions "the end of his stay," and the narrative continues:

-The end of his stay? So he did not stay on longer than that? -No, no longer. -So he departed? -Yes and no. -Yes and no? No mystery-mongering, please. Surely it can be said straight out. . . .And so our vague Peeperkorn was carried off by his malignant tropical fever, is that it? -No, that's not what happened to him. But why this impatience? Not everything can be known right off. That must still be taken as one of the conditions of life and of storytelling, and surely no one is about to rebel against God-given forms of human understanding.9

No highway here hurries the reader to a destination, there is only a series of back roads, each leading to a moment that both concludes something and starts up something new, so although it's a slow book, the reader is almost always curious about what's to come and beguiled by what's going on at the moment. Mann's acute psychological insight gives each incident vitality and interest. Also, like novels about universities, boarding schools, ships, or artists' colonies, this is a book about a microcosm. The sanatorium suggests a world and symbolizes a world: in this case a world so in love with death that no one in it can move-until, at the end of the book, the First World War begins, and shocks the patients back into life.

I don't recommend to new writers Melville's method of keeping a reader engaged, or Mann's. These books depend on greatness, a largeness of soul and scope that most of us can't count on, and on a symbolic structure that works. Nobody dreams those up-they happen or they don't. But there are other ways to shape a novel.

Sometimes a plot remains prominent in the reader's mind all the way through, even though the book includes much that's not directly connected to it. Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises,10 has a more developed plot than Moby-Dick or The Magic Mountain, but the plot takes up few of its words. Like those books, this one includes incidents that move the story along and long stretches that don't, but this book is organized differently. The characters are American and English expatriates living in Paris after the first World War. It's a perfect tourist's novel because the neighborhoods and landmarks where the characters drink and run into one another are familiar if you've ever spent even a couple of days in Paris. After a while the action moves to the bullfighting festival in Pamplona, and on the way the main character, Jake Barnes, spends several days fishing in the mountains. Then comes the fiesta, described in even greater detail than Paris. Much of the novel could almost be a travel diary, but it's shaped around a suspenseful sequence of events that make the reader curious and that lead to other events, events that embody the conflicts within the characters' personalities. Instead of just wandering around drinking, watching bulls die, and feeling alienated, they take action-or refrain from action-in a way that turns their feelings and wishes into a story. Nearly all of each scene is just an account of a place and its pleasures, but every scene has a reason for being in the book because each one includes a few paragraphs in which a remark or event or question turns the scene into background.

Jake Barnes, as everyone knows, was wounded during the war and is impotent, which in Hemingway's scheme of things is not mere "erectile dysfunction" but a tragedy. Jake loves a British woman, Lady Brett Ashley, who plans to marry a man she doesn't love: she loves Jake Barnes, but she can't do without sex. A friend of Jake's also falls in love with Brett. Much of the plot has to do with his efforts to woo her, as they all eventually meet up in Spain. Meanwhile, Brett becomes infatuated with a bullfighter, who represents a kind of hope: his physical prowess, courage, and adherence to tradition suggest the possibility of a life with honor, which seems impossible to the disillusioned and wounded main characters. Near the end, Brett runs off with the bullfighter, but then calls upon Jake to come to her in Madrid. She has left her lover and they return to Paris. They can't have what they want, but at least Brett has refrained from spoiling the bullfighter's life.

It seems that Hemingway began with experiences from his life-drinking, fishing, going to bullfights-and placed a plot on top of them, so that each scene is dominated by a question in the reader's mind. Say you wanted to write a novel but all you could think of was your own day: breakfast, exercise, work, lunch, and so on. By superimposing a series of questions or uncertainties on the scenes, you could give them point and direction. During breakfast, the phone rings: a colleague is in the hospital. You're at the gym when you get a call on your cell phone from your accountant, who needs to see your firm's financial records immediately. Halfway through the morning, you realize that only your sick colleague can explain certain disparities in the bookkeeping. After lunch you drop in at the hospital, where your colleague has been rushed to surgery. Mid-afternoon comes a call from the police.... As in Hemingway's book, most of your pages may be about what you ate, your workout, your ride to work, but the superimposed crises-even though each takes only a few words to narrate-change your activities from foreground to background, and what you eat for lunch is suddenly not part of a foodie's diary but a shrewdly understated suspenseful scene, in which the only thing that matters is barely mentioned but crucial.

The more elaborate and suspenseful the structure of a book, the more the reader becomes aware of the writer as a dominant, even manipulative presence, which suits some writers and some books, but would feel wrong in others. Graham Greene's The Quiet American11 has a complex storyline that moves back and forth between two time periods. This novel, which was written before our own Vietnamese war but tells us a great deal about it, is narrated by a British journalist, Thomas Fowler, living in Saigon in the 1950s. Fowler is in love with a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, but can't marry her because his wife, back home in England, won't give him a divorce. The novel begins with the account of one evening, then moves forward in two separate time lines, as Fowler tells us the story of the few days following that first evening, and repeatedly interrupts that story with the story of the previous months. Fowler is one of those mid-20th-century men, like Rick in Casablanca, who are determined not to get involved in injustice around them. The story, of course, is about how something reaches him after all, and he takes action.

Chronologically, the events of this story start when Pyle, the American of the title, arrives in Saigon full of naïve, impractical, and insensitive notions. The men meet, and Pyle falls in love with Fowler's girlfriend and eventually persuades her to live with him. Fowler comes across evidence that links Pyle to a general who is fighting both the French and the Vietminh. A bomb goes off in a public square, killing dozens of people. Fowler runs into Pyle in the confusion, and Pyle assures him that the woman they both love is not in the vicinity, though she ordinarily would be there at that hour. Fowler realizes that Pyle has warned Phuong, which proves that he knew about the explosion in advance. Fowler stops being an observer and starts in motion a plot by which Pyle is lured to a place where he is killed.

By telling the story in two alternating narratives, Greene keeps much of this information back until he is ready for you to learn it. The first time line begins with the discovery that Pyle is dead, and continues through several occasions when the French police question Fowler. Sentences like "I told myself again I was innocent," hint that something is being withheld. In these scenes Fowler tells us the sort of thing Pyle did, delaying the story of exactly what he did, and thus increasing our curiosity. Though events are told out of order, the author doesn't baffle us more than we're willing to be baffled: we always have enough information to grasp what's going on, though it doesn't mean as much to us as it will later, when we know more. We have the full measure of Fowler's rage at Pyle from the beginning, but we don't know exactly what justifies the rage until the end, and the effect is to first put Fowler at a distance and then draw us closer to him as we become as angry as he is.

The second narrative, interrupting the first, begins earlier, when Fowler and Pyle meet, and recounts their relationship, leading up to the explosion in the square. Before we learn what Fowler does after the explosion, we read another chapter from the time after the death, in which he is yet again questioned by the police. The policeman leaves, and Fowler tells the reader, "I wished I had the courage to call him back and say, 'You are right. I did see Pyle the night he died.'"12 And then, at last, the narrative returns to the time after the explosion, and we learn just what Fowler said and did. In the final chapter, the policeman is gone, he won't be back, he won't ever learn just what happened, and Fowler reads a telegram from his ex-wife that says she will give him a divorce after all.

Told chronologically, the story would be about the transformation within Fowler from observer to participant, and our uncertainty would be about whether the group that sets out to murder Pyle will succeed and whether Fowler will be caught. As it is, the events of the story evoke more curiosity because we know about them vaguely before we know about them precisely: hints and foreshadowing make us more and more curious-and also constantly remind us that we are in the hands of a narrator (and author) who is securely in charge. From the first we know that Fowler may have been involved in something big, but we don't know for sure, we don't know what or why, and-because the later narrative keeps moving forward, just as the earlier one does-we don't know what the results of his act will be. The organization of this story, even more than the story itself, makes it an extremely suspenseful book, centering not on what happens but on Fowler as a man and storyteller.

We wait, not just for him to act, but for him as narrator to admit to us what he did. We, the readers, become the questioners to whom he delays telling the whole truth but to whom he does not lie.

If Moby-Dick is a straight road with cul de sacs and The Magic Mountain is a series of linked scenic roads moving slowly toward a destination, The Sun Also Rises might be a monorail tour through a zoo: we move smoothly toward the end of the line while looking down on the tigers-or bulls in this case-but never forgetting our vantage point. As for The Quiet American, in which the forward motion in the reader's mind is achieved by forward motion along two separate timelines by the author, we could describe it as a trail up a mountain, consisting of a series of switchbacks, so the reader is sometimes heading one way and sometimes the other, yet always moving closer to the peak.

Novels about family life are most like the shapeless novels by new writers that I found myself reading, and suggest that there are good reasons for some of the shapelessness. Many novelists, however strongly they wish to keep a reader interested, have another strong wish. Life-especially family life-does not feel like a well-plotted novel. Often it feels chaotic. Events happen without connection to other events. Or nothing may seem to happen at all, yet suddenly children have grown into adults. Can a novel be organized and pointed enough to keep a reader involved, while still being sufficiently haphazard to be faithful to what we know of life, especially life in a family over the course of years?

I'll consider three novels about family life: The Years, by Virginia Woolf,13 The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West,14 and The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead.15 In these books, not much may happen in the family week by week, but passions are strong. There is suffering, and the overriding question is not, as in the novel about a trip, "Will they get there?" but "Will these children survive to adulthood with any semblance of happiness?" We don't just wonder if they'll have happiness as children might define it-if the little girl will find her stuffed animal, if the teenager will win the game or pass the test-questions that might propel a children's book. In family novels that work, we wonder if the children will succeed in adult terms-if they'll live or die, surrender to despair or have good lives-and when an incident is one that would ordinarily matter only to a child, the author will make sure that it suggests something larger, and evokes adult anxieties in us. In these novels, the family is often poor, or the adults are eccentric, or defeated by illness, alcohol, or obsession, or are neglectful or cruel. Or a family may suffer prejudice or injustice. History may intrude, if only subtly. To bring in my road metaphor one last time, these novels, which move in a direction, but slowly, are city walks, leaving time for observation but still providing a sense of forward motion, whether in a straight line or in a series of linked shorter journeys, each arising out of the one before, like a series of errands, each of which suggests the next.

In a family novel, the beginning often makes clear what kind of trouble the family is or may be in. And then it gives that trouble embodiment in events: if the family is poor, there is not just daily deprivation, but also a crisis involving money: a promise of money to come, a potential loss of a job or house. If the problem is neglect, a child will get hurt or become sick: the neglect will have consequences. If there isn't an obvious plot arising from the initial situation, the novel will find a plot because there will be a series of threats, promises, deadlines-and, simply, the passage of time. We wonder who will live or die, marry or divorce, thrive or fail, and enough time will pass that we find out the answers. And there's something else: often the authors of these books seem to take pleasure in writing about the inevitable absurdity of family life, the silliness of the passions and rages that arise from it, and so the resulting book is at least partly funny. Nobody writes a good family novel who is afraid to embrace the ridiculous. Taking self-destructive people too seriously (good family novels always include some self-destructive people), wears out the reader along with the characters.

The Years, by Virginia Woolf, isn't exactly funny, but a wry authorial awareness of foible and foolishness is always present and is one reason this book, while it doesn't have much action, is entirely readable. Woolf worked on it and suffered over it for many years, sure it was no good, but when it came out in 1937, it was highly praised and popular. The characters have intense feelings, and much time passes. History-the first World War and what came after it-breathes on these people. It's about the Pargiter family, not an especially troubled clan, but one experiencing plenty of ordinary woe, and it consists of a series of scenes taking place from 1880 to what Woolf calls "the present day": the early 1930s. In the first scene, the main characters-the Pargiter children-range in age from seven to young adulthood. Their mother is dying. An older brother, Edward, is a student at Oxford. The oldest sister, Eleanor, looks after the younger children and her father, pouring tea. Rose, the youngest child, goes alone to a nearby store after dark to buy a toy, and on the way back a strange man frightens her. The scenes are clear, glancing and cinematic, not weighted by explanations. Later scenes are about one or another of these characters and their cousins and descendants. From slight references we learn what has become of people. Eleanor never marries and looks after her father until he dies. Edward doesn't marry the girl he loves and becomes a translator of Latin. Rose is a suffragist who goes to prison. Woolf avoids what we think of as plot: no mysteries arise out of a character's plans or secrets; everybody just lives. But there is plenty to keep a reader curious, primarily because so much time passes. We care about the characters and then there they are, just the same or strikingly different, twenty or forty years later.

The scenes are engrossing because the characters' feelings are intense and irrational. Someone has a party. Will Sara-a niece of the original children, an eccentric-get around to attending? How disagreeable will the elders-the original children-be, and who will offend whom? Will the party be a failure?

In this novel, more than in most, part of what keeps one reading is not curiosity. Descriptions are vivid and engrossing. Formal repetition, without being oppressive, keeps one mesmerized. I returned to this book after many years because I remembered liking it, and also remembered that it didn't have a lot of story. I thought this time I might be impatient, but I reread it far more quickly and readily than the slight structure of questions raised about the characters might explain, and found I had trouble putting it down. When I did stop, Woolf's rhythms would stay in my head, and I'd feel slightly excited, slightly breathless-the way we sometimes feel after reading or hearing several poems by the same poet, as characteristic cadences speed up our breathing. One night after I'd put the book away but kept hearing it in my head, I thought, is she writing in dactyls? Not quite, but almost.

Dactylic meter, of course, is what Homer and Virgil used. In Latin and Greek a pattern of long and short syllables produce meter: the dactylic foot is long, short, short. It's not often used in English, where it becomes a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, but you may know it from Longfellow's Evangeline:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring
pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss and in garments green,
indistinct in the twilight...16

Virginia Woolf was thinking of music, not poetic meter. Much of The Years is almost in waltz time: "The soul flying upwards like sparks up the chimney,"17 a character says when asked what she's thinking of. Woolf doesn't overdo it, but once you realize what she's up to, the number of unstressed syllables is striking. The characters talk about waltzes and waltz time, humming and singing along. "Sara was drumming a waltz rhythm on the table. Eleanor began to hum in time to it. 'Hoity te, toity te, hoity te....'"18 In another scene there's a polka, and in others we hear about a trombone's rhythm, jog-trot rhythm, and a foxtrot. The rhythms and descriptions of the scenes and the weather inform Woolf's argument in this book, which has to do with what one of the characters calls the expansion of the soul. Eleanor thinks, "When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?"19 Making us slightly breathless physically, the book forces us to feel that excitement. In another scene we have, "An edge of light surrounded everything. A red-gold fume arose from the dust on the road. Even the little red brick villas on the high roads had become porous, incandescent with light, and the flowers in cottage gardens, lilac and pink like cotton dresses, shone veined as if lit from within."20

Sometimes waltzes are broken off. Characters are always being interrupted, always forgetting what they mean to do. Near the end, Eleanor, now elderly, thinks about life: "This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We're only just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there."21 When she then thinks of death and endless darkness, the party that ends the book has lasted all night, and to her surprise she sees daylight. In the last sentence of The Years, the sun has just risen. Formal elements add momentum to a story that doesn't stray from the concerns of one family, but the formal elements aren't intrusive, and most readers, though benefiting from them, have probably been unconscious of them. The basic structure that keeps us reading is what keeps us reading in far less unusual books: we want to know what will happen next to characters we have come to care about.

Rebecca West's 1956 novel The Fountain Overflows, about a family in England at the turn of the 20th century, remains entirely in the consciousness of one child, Rose Aubrey, over the course of years. The book begins, "There was such a long pause that I wondered whether my Mamma and my Papa were ever going to speak to each other again."22 The reader already knows there is trouble. Soon we learn that the problem is Papa, an idealist who with charming optimism gambles their money away on unlikely investment schemes. The children love him dearly, his wife-driven wild by him-is still faithful and devoted, and the reader (who likes him too) always knows he is impossible, and that he may doom his family. The most clearly marked path in this book is toward financial ruin and the inevitable departure of Papa, whose irresponsibility finally carries him off, whereupon it turns out that Mrs. Aubrey has kept from him one valuable source of money, so she and the children do not starve. She blames herself for this deception, even as she takes advantage of it. Ambivalence is a flourishing plant in The Fountain Overflows.

This book has a plot in Forster's sense-events arising from the father's improvidence-and two subplots. West recounts incidents in a leisurely, descriptive way, but each causes the next one, until a resolution is reached and something momentous has occurred. This is a family of musicians: Rose, her twin sister Mary, and their mother are pianists; the mother was a successful concert pianist before her marriage. Cordelia, the oldest sister, plays the violin, but she has neither precision nor a sense of music. Rose, Mary, and their mother must suffer Cordelia's playing, and their politeness and agony are funny and heartbreaking. Then-West devises an event that gives Cordelia's lack of talent embodiment in the practical world-an equally unmusical teacher befriends Cordelia and pushes her into a performing career: she plays for ignorant boors who think she's wonderful. We read on, hoping and fearing, along with Rose and Mary, that Cordelia will discover that she really can't play the violin. This book is the best fiction I know about what it's like to watch bad art achieve success while good art (Rose and Mary's piano playing) goes unrewarded.

The second subplot involves a murder. The mother of a schoolmate of Rose's kills her husband, and the Aubreys become suspicious of the woman even before the crime, then take in the murderer's pathetic sister, to shield her from public scrutiny, as the murderer is captured, tried, and almost executed. Mr. Aubrey, a political journalist, champions the accused woman, not because he thinks she is innocent but because the trial is unfair. This story-in which everything happens quite naturally and Mr. Aubrey is both admirable and impossible, always ready to deprive his family for one of his causes-intertwines with the others, and combined they form a novel that keeps us reading while never imposing too much orderliness or predictability on the chaos of life. We stay involved because of these braided stories, and no less because of the novel's lovable and unbearable characters, not to mention Rose's irrepressible impatience with the people around her.

Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children is a family story something like The Fountain Overflows, but as unrestrained as West's book is modulated. Stead was Australian, but lived for years in the United States, and this novel, published in 1940, is set in Washington, D.C. and a poor neighborhood of Annapolis, Maryland. The man of the title is Samuel Clemens Pollit, a naturalist with seven children, who, like the Aubrey children, live in poverty because of his improvidence. Sam Pollit's wife Henny, unlike the noble wife in The Fountain Overflows, screams about her husband all day long in his hearing-she never speaks directly to him-making largely true, shockingly nasty, and completely ineffectual accusations.

The novel is a funny, unbearable mess of haplessness and outrageousness. Sam Pollit speaks of himself in the third person as "Sam the bold" and adopts baby talk or fake foreign accents, so there is irony in everything he says, and he is never silent. At first he seems not too different from Piers Aubrey: irresponsible but almost forgivable, and lovable because under his eye his children are imaginative, playful, and outspoken. Slowly the reader comes to realize that this partly good impression is a mistake. Sam is so sure he is always right that he sees and hears nothing but himself. He turns on the children who love him best, thinking nothing of reading their diaries aloud or revealing their secrets, encouraging the others to laugh. An amiable fascist, he believes inferior people should be painlessly gotten rid of.

The Man Who Loved Children would be ruined by a neat, controlling plot: the feel of a world out of control is essential to it, both because it centers on the imaginative and frightening life of young children and because its main character is out of control. If you're not observant, you may think of it as a book that just flops from scene to scene, from one mishap and argument and crazy, thrilling project to another, but like The Magic Mountain, it starts up stories that will come to fruition later, and moves in a direction to a shocking end.

Time and money shape this book, as they shape so many others. Eventually, Sam loses his job and the family its home. They move into a dilapidated house where he continues his crackpot projects as if nothing is wrong, while the family exists on no money, and he becomes harsher and crueler. At the end, Sam is systematically-and still cheerfully, affectionately-humiliating his children, who are the most real fictional children-messy and playful and irrational and in pain-that I can think of. His one remaining old friend gives him a huge marlin, and Sam exuberantly makes the children stay up all night boiling this fish in order to prove that its oil will be useful. The smell permeates the house and becomes the smell of moral and emotional decay. In the final scenes the older children have begun to understand what's going on, and they bring about change, though it's change as hapless and outrageous as everything else in this book. The apparently rambling, pointless catastrophes come together in events that may not solve anybody's problems, but bring about a conclusion. The book is all but shapeless (it was about The Man Who Loved Children that Randall Jarrell famously wrote that the novel is "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it")23 but the bones of a plot work with Christina Stead's clear-eyed but exuberant and devastating characterizations to keep us joyfully reading.

What lessons can we learn from all these novels, as some of us intrepidly try our own? How can we be faithful to the randomness of life, while giving our books the shapeliness of art? If we are novelists whose thoughts first go to characters and situations rather than to stories, maybe we should stop and decide, early on, what in our characters' lives can be arranged so as to make our readers curious, and then we should write our books with readers in mind. We need to tell our stories in an order that will be interesting and suspenseful, which is often, though not always chronological. If we don't instinctively come up with enough story, we need to think up actions that will be tangible results of our characters' feelings and personalities, and will have further consequences in other actions. We should bear in mind that deadlines and money are good sources of events that can make a difference for our characters. In other words, we should give our people not just characteristics but characteristic action, and then let that action have results that accumulate until something big-something worthy of being a novel's climax-occurs. And perhaps most importantly, we should make our characters as strange and outrageous and passionate as real people are, so that while our readers roll or tramp steadily toward their destination, something will keep them not just curious but happy.

AWP

Alice Mattison's most recent novel is Nothing Is Quite Forgotten In Brooklyn. Others include The Book Borrower and Hilda and Pearl. She teaches fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars.

1. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1955), 86.

2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 87.
4. Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar," from The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books. 1972), 46.
5. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, published by arrangement with the Arion Press. 1983.)
6. Ibid., 7.
7. Ibid., 577.
8. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Everyman's Library. 2005.)
9. Ibid., p. 682.
10. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner. 2003).
11. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (New York: Penguin Books. 2002).
12. Ibid., 171.
13. Virginia Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. 1965).
14. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (New York: New York Review Books. 2003).
15. Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 1940). Introduction by Randall Jarrell.
16. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline and Selected Tales and Poems (New York: Signet. 1964), 44.
17. Woolf, 297.
18. Ibid., 288.
19. Ibid., 297.
20. Ibid., 306.
21. Ibid., 428.
22. West, 5.
23. Stead, xl.