Debra Spark | March/April 2017

NOTES

From whence the idea of a surprise party? It seems bound up with cruelty, no? You pretend you don’t care about a person, that you’ve forgotten the occasion of their birthday or simply made too little of it, then you hit them with a social event for which they are unprepared. Next, you require a few hours of joviality, no matter that for most of us that sort of exuberance requires a lot of work.

So why did the idea of the surprise party always strike me as kind of… welcome? Why did I have the vague idea that I’d like somebody to throw me one? Maybe it was that graduate school boyfriend who came to my apartment one day and said, “Hey, honey, look what I got for your birthday.” Season tickets to the University of Iowa’s wrestling matches. Great. That’s really special. The next year the same boyfriend decided we should have a party and sent me out to buy the cake and ice cream. Oh, I was no picnic of a girlfriend, I’ll be frank, and he had plenty of virtues. Still, what if he had given me something unexpected, out of generosity? The tickets were unexpected, yes, but certainly not generous. What if he had given me a book, now that I think about it? A good book? In theory, a surprise party is unexpected, generous, and entertaining. Sometimes there are good eats. Books, at least the ones I love, are unexpected, generous, and entertaining. No one gets bored or leaves early or wishes they hadn’t come in the first place. As for the noshes, I can supply them myself.

This essay is my paean to literature as surprise party, conceived in response to the big whammy of a plot surprise in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. I gather some readers saw it coming. As for me, I jumped when I got to the surprise, put my hand to my lips, said (out loud and even though I was alone), “Oh!” Then immediately thought, “How delicious.”

How I love the fun of a shocker, the I-had-no-idea-wouldn’t-have-guessed-in-a-million-years surprise. My jaded self reads the summary of a movie or book and thinks, “Well, I know what that will be about. No thank you.” How I love to be proven wrong, for my disappointed-in-advance expectations not to be born out.

If your day job involves any of the many compromises people make to earn a living, the idea of reading fiction for employment must sound pretty appealing. Charles McGrath wrote in the New York Times about his experience of being a judge for the National Book Awards. I don’t know that McGrath was paid for his effort. Perhaps the job was one of the many “services” that literary lights are expected to offer to the profession. Whatever the case, he didn’t entirely enjoy the task. The title of his article was “Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous.” Of the numerous volumes he had to read, he wrote, “There were moments when I began to doubt the whole enterprise of fiction writing itself. Does the world really need hundreds and hundreds of new novels or story collections every year, especially when so many of them are so similar? Eventually, I had trouble keeping all the stories straight, and in my mind—and even in my dreams occasionally—the book overlapped, with couples failing to understand each other over and over again, and families endlessly dumping their woes onto the next generation.”¹ McGrath’s frustration here would seem to be about subject matter. Why always the oh-so-familiar psychology of couples and families?

When I think about the books I read in 2013, I can think of many that I loved that fall into this category—Elizabeth Graver’s multigenerational family story in The End of the Point and Suzanne Berne’s drama of comfortable suburban life in The Dogs of Littlefield—but I can also think of many that include but move beyond this rubric: Kate Atkinson’s alternative life histories during the World Wars in Life After Life, Lore Segal’s take on the depredations of old age in Half the Kingdom, and Donna Tartt’s art theft caper turned meditation on class, the American landscape, and the transcendent nature of beauty.

Having owned up to his despair, McGrath writes, “There are only two reasons for reading fiction, I finally decided: to experience beautiful, original prose and to learn something about people and their nature. To judge from my reading, exceptionally beautiful and original prose is in short supply these days. And during the summer doldrums I sometimes found myself thinking that I was paying the price for an overly bookish life. I already knew what little there really was for fiction to teach us. Human beings are flawed and do foolish things, especially when love and money are involved. O.K. I think I got that.”

Though I have sometimes been weary of fiction, especially when plowing through a box of fiction for some contest or other that I have agreed to judge, McGrath’s thoughts still took me aback. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “What about fiction making us laugh or cry? What about fiction surprising us, not just with human truth and beautiful language, but also with a good story, a cleverly constructed narrative, or simply the stuff of the world? What about fiction entertaining us?”

McGrath’s words made me flash on Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain.” Often anthologized and often taught, “Bullet in the Brain” is about Anders, a clever, yet cranky book reviewer, accustomed to using his sharp wit to eviscerate the weaknesses and clichés in the work that comes across his desk. The habit extends to his daily life, so when he finds himself in a bank that is being robbed, he can’t stop himself from making editorial comments. How to refrain, when the robbers’ dialogue is so comically derivative? Eventually, Anders offers one too many smartass comments, and a robber shoots him in the head. The story then moves to super-slow time, scientifically detailing the path of the bullet through Anders’s brain, before listing the things that Anders didn’t think about in his final moment of life. The list of forgotten things gives a portrait of Anders’s life, depicting the cranky part, but also the younger self who once felt the world’s desperation with great pain (“Lord have mercy!” he had shouted when he saw a woman jump from a building just days after his daughter was born) and who once loved literature and memorized poems “so he could give himself the shivers at will.” The final moment—and the final paragraph of Wolff’s story—is reserved for the last thought of Anders’s life, the memory of a few words uttered at a childhood baseball game. When asked what position he wants to play, another boy says, “Shortstop. Short’s the best position they is.”² Anders ever the grammarian, presumably even as a child, wants to ask the boy to repeat his words. But it isn’t to tease the boy for his error, as he knows his teammates will assume if he makes the request. Rather Anders loves the beauty and music of the final two words of the sentence. They is, they is, they is, Anders remembers quietly chanting to himself just at the moment that he (Anders) isn’t. What the bored Anders remembers is being surprised by language. Just the pleasure that McGrath is embracing. But Wolff’s story goes well-beyond beautiful prose and lessons about people. It’s funny (and humor is by nature a surprise). Its conceit is unusual, as is its content. Ditto the formal trick of shifting the narrative terms mid-way through the story and entering a new kind of time and space, where reality has to be described in a different way. If Anders, uncompromising as he is, were to read “Bullet in the Brain,” he’d appreciate it all, not just the final two words, because it is all unexpected.

In a sense, isn’t that what McGrath is asking for, something he, with all his years as editor of The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, hasn’t seen before?

I like to listen to a podcast called the Slate Culture Gabfest, which consists of Slate writers and the occasional guest critic talking about the culture news of the week. In January of 2014, they were considering the various nominees for the Oscars, and in the midst of their discussion about Philomena, the show’s host, Stephen Metcalf, said, “The film is very well made, but it doesn’t surprise us. Does that matter?” ³ I kept waiting for his fellow panelists to take up the “Does that matter?” question or even to address the movie’s surprise or lack thereof. I haven’t seen Philomena so don’t know what to make of the critique of the movie but as to the surprise question, I thought, Yes, absolutely it has to surprise us. Surprise is the very basis of art. Isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Alice La Plante’s Method and Madness, the textbook that I sometimes use for my introductory undergraduate writing courses begins by discussing surprise: “What makes something worth reading? One answer, to paraphrase E.M. Forster, in his landmark book Aspects of the Novel, is that good writing is that which is surprising yet convincing.”⁴

But it occurs to me that we rarely hold surprise out as a separate craft element. In fact, the E.M. Forster quote that LaPlante references isn’t about good writing in general, but about one aspect of writing: character. Forster is talking about what makes a character round. There is no chapter in LaPlante’s book on surprise in the way there is on plot, character, point of view, and theme. Surely this is because all these things are meant to be surprising, in their own way. Or not all of these things all the time—that would be problematic, of course; you want elements of the familiar in your work, lest it all be madhouse and disorientation—but some of these things at different times. What would it be like to hold “surprise” out as a separate category of discussion?

Peter Harris’s poem, “Surprise at Immaculate Conception Primary” provides one answer to that question. It begins,

At age five, my son said, “I’m not going
to that school.” Why? “Mrs. O’Donovan
gets really cross and it … surprises me.”

Me, too, surprised by what he said
and by the word: surprise, a quality
I crave in art, its satisfying shock.⁵

The phrase “satisfying shock” gets at two aspects of surprise in art: its unexpectedness and its just rightness. “Just right” because it offers the reader, as Harris writes, the thing (or at least one of the things) one most longs for in art. But also “just right,” because the surprise feels true, somehow accurate to how things are in the world or how they are in the narrative, as when an unexpected word precisely articulates an observation about how things look or feel or when a surprise makes the larger narrative click into place.

The shocker in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is an example of this second kind of surprise. All of a sudden what has been vaguely confusing in the novel, so vaguely confusing that it has only barely registered as off, becomes clear. This is, as Peter Harris himself taught me, Aristotle’s anagnorisis or moment of recognition. Wikipedia, referencing Northrop Frye, describes anagnorisis as “a moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery. Anagnorisis originally meant recognition in its Greek context, not only of a person but also of what that person stood for. Anagnorisis was the hero’s sudden awareness of a real situation, the realization of things as they stood, and finally, the hero’s insight into a relationship with an often antagonistic character in Aristotelian tragedy.”⁶ It is the shock that allows, as Peter Harris says, “the retrospective recognition of all that has come before.” Hello, Oedipus, that’s Mommy. Hello, Luke Skywalker, that’s Daddy.

In the fall of 2013, the poet Rachel Contreni-Flynn introduced Peter Harris before he gave a reading of his book, Freeing the Hook, at Colby College. Holding the book up, Flynn said,

It’s the surprise that this book accomplishes in poem after poem that I want to start us off with tonight. Surprise in poetry is where mystery and meaning mesh. Rarely cataclysmic, no big cliffhangers or gotchas. It’s almost a bodily tingle, a quick delicious recognition of how vibrant and flexible language can be. It can be hard to get at surprise. The poems in Freeing the Hook do it, word-by-word, stanza-by-stanza. The words themselves surprise in their precision and quirkiness, unusual but never so erudite or hidden to exclude the reader. Here, a party is a “soiree,” a girl doesn’t just find sweetness, she “dowses” for it. Things are “prismatized” and “Teflon-ed.” Professor Harris’s sunset at Great Pond isn’t pink it’s “brandied peach.” The metaphors of these poems, too, surprise with their freshness and just rightness. The feeling of a comparison you immediately know is true, as if you always thought it but didn’t know you thought it. Here, a son’s gratitude is “inningless,” his education is “a kickflip on a skateboard down some stairs.” A frozen bird is a “sugar cone inside a plush glove.” The subject matter of entire poems is entirely unique and surprising: Nixon and Plato perceived as cloud figures; a troubled young man who confesses his true love is a polar bear. Finally, for me, the best surprise of Freeing the Hook might be more like relief, a sense of refreshment, that the self and ego that is so dominant in so much of poetry here is subdued, sometimes not even present, so that “we” populate these poems—we’re invited in to question and celebrate our shared conscience and history. To me, that’s a level of sophistication and confidence that doesn’t need to insist me me me. Instead, it offers the clear, sometimes startling gaze, and says, “I’m asking you. I value your silence.”

This is a description of surprise in one man’s poetry that can be extrapolated to prose as well: surprise is something refreshing in the content, language, or authorial sensibility. It is where mystery (the strange) and meaning (the understood) meet up. A satisfying shock.

How does this all play out in fiction in terms of craft? Retrospectively, it makes sense that this is what surprise is, but what does that mean if I’ve got the idea of sitting down and writing a story that makes use of surprise? Perhaps not much, or not much initially, to the conscious mind. “I don’t think surprise comes as intention,” says Lore Segal, whose 2013 Half the Kingdom includes so many surprises. Her novel is a satire about a group of people who start to research the phenomenon of old people entering the ER of a Manhattan hospital and inevitably going “around the bend,” as the narrator puts it. I read the phenomenon of people’s minds disintegrating as more about the depressing culture of hospitals than as a peculiar syndrome as the over-serious researchers (and indeed as some reviewers) take it. The head of the investigative team is Joe Bernstine, who thinks the “copycat Alzheimer’s” at the hospital is a terrorist plot: “They have to drive us insane, while they keep us indefinitely alive.”⁷ Whatever the case, the pleasures of the novel are the weirdness of the conceit and the unexpected quirks of the characters. But referencing E.M. Forster, Segal says surprise is not something she put in the novel but what her subconscious offered up. E.M. Forster’s actual words are “(In the creative state), a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.”⁸

“Surprise,” says Dan Chaon, author of the almost unbearably suspenseful Await Your Reply, as well as four other works of fiction, “is one of the reasons I write.”⁹ He’s not referring to creating surprise, though he certainly does that is his work, but being surprised. His story “Big Me” is about a fanciful boy who is convinced that his new neighbor is his future self, a man who has travelled back in time, perhaps with some important information. The story has a number of surprises related to the point of view character’s imagination, behavior, and family, but the biggest surprise is a flash-forward at the close. In of itself, the time shift is a formal surprise. The pattern of the story has been that of a conventionally retrospective narrator. We don’t expect the leap into the future. But it is the content of the surprise that is most startling: Chaon offers one final detail about his character, a revelation that is both strange and wildly informative, allowing us to see all that has come before in a new and troubling light. But Chaon wasn’t conscious of what he was going to do at the end of “Big Me” until he wrote the final words. “It just kind of came out,” he says. “I wrote it and got up and did a dance. I did something, but I didn’t really do it.” Which is to say, the conscious part of his brain didn’t offer up the idea. “I lot of people who don’t really write don’t really believe that,” Chaon says. “They think we outline and know everything that happens.” Instead, Chaon describes his own hypnotic state of being where he lets “the unconscious or back of the mind or whatever you call it have free rein.”

Fiction writer Joan Wickersham’s thoughts are not far from Chaon’s. She is the author most recently of The News from Spain, a book of short stories, in which each story has the title “The News from Spain” and in which the phrase or concept of “The News from Spain” enters in some way. Of surprise, she says, “I don’t think about trying to surprise the reader, but I definitely pay attention to where I am surprised as a writer. When I get surprised in my work, I get very excited.”

So does this mean we just have to wait for the lightning bolt of inspiration to strike us, if we want to have surprises in our work? Surely not. Can’t we just be our regular old talented selves and work at it? But work at what exactly? Work at just rightness and unexpectedness? Well, there’s a recipe for writers’ block.

It might help to push beyond the basic definition and the process issue to consider what kinds of surprises there are in life and in literature. Rachel Contreni-Flynn says the situations in which she experiences surprise in her own life include catastrophe, epiphany, coincidence, and dumb luck. I have a similar but not identical list. I am most often surprised by bad news (like a friend’s cancer diagnosis), world news (like a plane disappearing into thin air), strange images (like the watermelon slice I once saw a man palming into his mouth, before I realized the watermelon was really his set of false teeth), and funny things people say (as when my son responds to a query about dinner by saying, “Eating. That’s so been there, done that. I prefer to photosynthesize.”) What else? Uncharacteristic or shocking behavior surprises me, as when I learn that an old friend and nice guy has, despite his lively, kind wife, had an affair with a student… and the student has committed suicide. With all these and other surprises, I just sense the wrongness or off-ness. No, no, no, my sister should not get cancer at age twenty-one. A deer’s head should not be detached from its body and staring at me from the back of a pick-up. Otherwise, I experience some pleasure: Ha! That’s irregular. My son has just emerged from school wearing a bulbous crown and his coronation isn’t till tonight. That said, my biggest surprise this week was an unexpected compliment. My husband’s biggest surprise was an unexpected promotion. These last two surprises were desirable—or desirable as far as my husband and I were concerned—but you couldn’t say they were “just right.”

So if surprises aren’t “just right” in life, why should they be in art? Probably because the nature of surprise in art is different than surprise in life. Art has design. Life? Not so much. What surprised me in my most recent reading? Original subject matter, plot twists, character quirks, anomalous moments, unusual descriptive language, curious observations, sudden shifts in focus, psychological and emotional truth, the handling of time, and formal changes in approach.

Two literary surprises I always enjoy occur when a book’s controlling metaphor or shape reveals itself—this is assuming a book has such a design—and when a book suddenly incorporates a major element that I didn’t expect to be there. When I try to describe this latter pleasure to students—and impress upon them that this is a technique they can use—I always say, “Your story has elements A, B, C, D, and E, and you are trying to ‘solve’ the story or work it out using those elements, but you don’t need to do that. You can add another letter. You can throw in a Z and entirely change the terms of the story.”

If I collapse what I just said down into a sentence, I’m making the unremarkable observation that in art either the material is surprising or the form that the material takes is surprising. It is surprising to paint many men in overcoats and bowler hats falling from the sky like rain. It’s not surprising to paint a nude, but to paint this nude in this way may be.

If our material comes from some partnership between the subconscious and normal experience, as E.M. Forster says, our working of that material is more in the conscious mind’s control. It is a matter of craft, something we can address, whether the muse is fickle or forthcoming. We can think in terms of unannounced leaps, breaks in patterns, revelation of hidden material, and sudden dislocations.

Pamela Erens says of her 2013 novel, The Virgins, that she “knew what would happen at the end and knew it would be dramatic and shocking, but after that, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about surprise.” This is in of itself surprising, because her book makes use of almost all the kinds of surprise in art that I just noted. Set in 1979, The Virgins is about a youthful romance, social mores, and nasty behavior at a New England prep school. The narrator is the WASPy Bruce Bennett-Jones. He serves as jealous observer to a love affair between the Jewish Aviva Rossner and the Asian American scholarship student Seung Jung. The narrative begins with Bruce’s early experience of Aviva, the day in which he sizes her up as a new girl in whom he might be interested. He makes a pass at her, gets too aggressive, she fights him off, and that seems to be the end, at least for a time, of their immediate experience of one another. Bruce then begins to tell the story of Aviva and Seung by writing, “It’s late September, early October. Let’s say October,” and “They meet in music theory. Let’s say that.”¹⁰ A little later, there is a two-sentence chapter in which Bruce says, “I’m inventing Seung, too, of course. It’s the least I can do for him.”¹¹ Given the intimacy of what Bruce describes between Aviva and Seung, it comes as a shock that he’s not describing something he actually knows about. And the surprise is a continual one as the novel moves forward. We get so immersed in the story of Aviva and Seung that we forget about the outside narrator, until Bruce steps in and reminds us. Despite Aviva and Seung’s mutual passion, their public displays of affection on campus, Seung is impotent the first time he tries to have sex with Aviva and also on subsequent times. Though embarrassed, Seung feels, on some level, that “to enter her body would unsettle and eventually anger her.”¹² OK. That seems to be an interesting bit of reasoning about the sexual issue. The narrative then adds, “He was protecting himself from Aviva, then? Obviously I can’t know that for sure.” Bruce is not friends with Seung, so the information—presented as fact—is no such thing. Seung has not confided his love life to Bruce; Bruce is making everything up. Still this detail about impotence reads as fact, until we are reminded about the terms of the narrative. Erens describes her own narrator as “faux omniscient first person,” and it is the unconventional point of view, the formal choice, that creates surprise in the narrative but also drama. What does it mean that Bruce wants to imagine this story in such detail? That he decides Seung is impotent? We get Aviva and Seung’s story as imagined by him, interspersed with “actual” material that might explain why he is doing this.  The point of view and the attendant effects aren’t the novel’s only surprises though.

Sixty pages into the novel, Bruce says, “After Seung’s death, after graduation, I learned more things from Carlyle.”¹³ Well, that’s a shocker. The apparently healthy Seung is going to die? And die young? What happens? Also on learning about Seung’s death, we may remember the earlier sentence, “I’m inventing Seung of course. It’s the least I can do for him.” What does that “of course” mean? Why would inventing a dead man be the least you could do for him? Wouldn’t remembering or describing him be a lot better?

As for other surprises: Bruce omits certain facts and then presents them at a moment when their earlier omission becomes startling. For instance, he has a girlfriend. Well, that’s normal enough—a high school boy has a girlfriend—but we learn about the girlfriend quite late in the novel, after we’ve seen Bruce make the pass at Aviva, once his obsession with her is so well-established that the additional information doesn’t feel duplicitous so much as curious. How it is that his thoughts and priorities are so bizarrely ordered that his girlfriend is such a minor subplot in his life? Bruce reveals things about his own ugly behavior that shock because typically people conceal the most shameful parts of themselves and because these despicable parts of himself live alongside the part of himself that is able to imagine the lives of Aviva and Seung with sympathy, complexity, and depth, as well as the more obvious perversion. The narrative appears to be a chronological text but it then leaps forward in unpredictable ways to let us know who Bruce becomes in later life, knowledge which shifts the terms of the story: This is not a study of Aviva and Seung and their prep school romance. It is a study of Bruce and why he wants to narrate this tale after all this time.

So given that Erens wasn’t particularly thinking of surprise, how did she manage so much of it? The answer has to do with intuition but also revision. She says, “Once I had decided on point of view with the first person acting as third person, I just sort of heard the character introducing that truth every so often.” As for Bruce’s honesty about his ugliness, she says, “He’s quite aware of the unattractive parts of himself and simply more vocal than some. It was part of my conception of the character. He dislikes the parts of himself that are ugly. He knows he’s incorrect.” At one point, the novel has an interesting shift of focus, when it turns its attention to Detweiller, a side character, who is behaving atypically. The odd behavior is related to drug consumption, and Erens says, “It felt like a piece of the narrative that needed to be expressed, that there are these casualties. I’m writing about drugs, and it came out through that particular character.”

But the jump forward in time came, in a manner of speaking, from an outside source. “What happened with this book, and I hate talking about it,” says Erens, “is originally I had a separate narrative that takes place twenty years later. My agent loved the first part and not the second, and I had a similar response from another agent. The second half didn’t have the same narrator. It was pure third person. I lost the juice of the first narrator in the second half. I tried to think of how to refashion it. Then I wanted the revision to bring some of the material from the second part of the novel into the first part of the novel. One thing was Bruce in his life now and what he was up to, so that accounts for the forward leaps.” In collapsing aspects of the second half of the novel into the first, Erens created (and perhaps initially unintentionally) the jumps that account for some of the novel’s most pleasing surprises. Meanwhile both Erens’s agent and editor told her that she needed more scenes with Bruce and that he didn’t come into the narrative often enough, that the story went on too long before the reader was reminded of him. To address this, Erens added in more scenes of Bruce’s life instead of his imagined version of the life of Aviva and Seung, and she also added more “I’m-the-storyteller” reminders. We think of surprise as coming in the conception of a piece, but in The Virgins, Erens created surprise by addressing a problem unrelated to the unexpected.

Another way to think about surprise isn’t so much as a break in the expected pattern but as authenticity. Surprise then is the real, because the real is surprising. Surprise is the truth of the matter. A cliché is the lie. “Surprise,” opines Lore Segal, “is something that comes to you that you weren’t prepared for, which is what life often does and in a frequently unpleasant manner.”

In Half the Kingdom a white woman sees a black woman jump to her death, and she doesn’t run for help or call someone. She just stands there. And Segal wrote the moment this way, simply because it struck her as true. “When something happens your reaction isn’t going to be what you think it is going to be,” Segal says. “Whether you respond to a death or a present, you love it or don’t love it, your reactions are all probably different from what the rules say they should be.”

In Half the Kingdom, a writer named Lucy, out of control with despair about an editor ignoring one of her story submissions, starts to call up friends and simply read her stories out loud to them, always a story that has a meta-meaning related to the rest of the narrative. I liked this absurdist, comical turn. But when I remarked on it to Segal, she said she wasn’t even thinking of Lucy’s behavior as a funny bit. It was something she’d simply heard about. Apparently people often call up her friend Cynthia Ozick and read their stories out loud to her. The detail was surprising simply because it was true.

I know this flies in the face of the regretful “But it really happened” defense that some writers deliver as a response to workshop criticism. Thereafter, the gentle workshop leader has to explain why it doesn’t really matter if it happened or not, it’s still not working on the page. So an addendum: What happened isn’t necessarily the truth. It’s just what’s most obvious. Joan Wickersham says of her own stories, “When I am writing, I’m trying to tell the truth, and normally there is a surprise in there.” She adds, “When I was younger, I tried to control everything and understand things before I wrote them. Now I’m trying to push past the obvious to get to the real thing.”

The surprises Segal and Wickersham seem to be referencing are about behavior and psychology, but also perhaps about authorial or narrative wisdom. The surprise of articulating something correctly. “Oh, my God,” says Rachel Contreni-Flynn of how she reacts to this sort of surprise, “That’s exactly right. That’s authentic. That’s no cellophane and bullshit. That is what I experience in poems that actually strike me. That moment of plumbing the emotion and being able to distill in language what is at the core and what is real.” Similarly, Wickersham says that the surprises she likes best in her reading occur when she recognizes something as true and thinks, “I can’t believe that that person got that.”

One of Wickersham’s “News from Spain” stories begins, “Years later, long after what most people thought of as the real action was over, Rosina and Elvira met and became friends. They had exiled themselves from their old lives. Rosina was divorced, and Elvira hadn’t seen Johnny in years. They met in a cooking class, which both had signed up for distractedly, thinking it might be good for them.”¹⁴ There’s all sorts of good tension here, concerning the back-story, the action that is over, and the women’s current lives and what will happen when the two women meet, but the story goes well beyond the drama that one might imagine unfurling from this beginning. The Elvira and Rosina of this opening paragraph are heroines from two different Mozart operas, characters who are refigured as contemporary (or in most regards contemporary) women, who form a friendship long after they have both been involved with Johnny, a character who elides aspects of Don Giovanni with aspects of the count from The Marriage of Figaro. The women’s back-story makes use of the operas and is achingly accurate about the pleasure of a love affair, the pain of its loss and the damage a person with multiple lovers can do. The front-story is about the women’s friendship and their lives over many years, all of it delicately and convincingly handled, including complicated sections about Elvira’s life as an artist. The story is told in nine numbered sections. In the fourth section, without any preparation, Mozart’s librettist becomes a character in the story. He doesn’t engage with Elvira and Rossini, but narrates two freestanding sections, in which he unburdens himself of the story of his rakish ways and his artistic collaboration with Mozart. Unlike the heroines, he is not updated for the times, but narrates as if from his own century and with the language (more or less) of his era: “Friendly reader!” begins one section. “Though why I begin this chapter with these words I do not know, as I am fairly certain that what I write here will be crumpled up and thrown into the fire before any reader, friendly or otherwise, has been permitted to see it.”¹⁵ Beyond the story’s unusual conceit and its emotional and psychological authenticity, there are miniplot surprises: a mysterious box, a loaded discussion of what to do with one’s possessions once one dies, and a description of Elvira’s painting and the startling direction in which it goes, after she resumes her love affair with Johnny. There are surprises in the story’s construction: the Johnny character seems at one point to be a wine seller, at another a filmmaker. Rosina’s wealth feels stylized, not quite of this century, though other details are decidedly 21^st century. At one point, the third person narrator of an Elvira-Rosina sections slides, midnarrative, into the first person. The writing about art can be experienced as a metanarrative about Elvira’s artistic process and the librettist’s creation, all of which might reflect Wickersham’s life as a writer. At one point Wickersham writes of Elvira, “Her work was going badly: diligent, correct charcoal studies of stonework. She told herself to have faith, this at least was work, maybe these studies would coalesce and inspire something else, or would turn out to mean something in themselves. But she knew they stank.”¹⁶ And, in a better mood, the librettist writes of his collaboration with Mozart, “Those were the happiest days of my life, working at something while knowing how exceptional it was, not yet having finished it but knowing how beautiful it would be when finished.”¹⁷ The link here between Elvira at the low point of artistic creation and the librettist at the high is another surprise of Wickersham’s story: the tightness of its design, the thematic links between the librettist’s story, the women’s story, and Mozart’s own efforts; art, pain, and Casanova-type men playing a part in them all. Wickersham observes that though women are humiliated by their lovers in the operas, the beauty of Mozart’s music elevates the attendant pain. Wickersham’s story does the same; it elevates the humiliation through the beauty of the telling and the narrative sympathy. In the end, Wickersham says, she knew her story made sense as “an unified piece of thought.” An intellectual construct arose from the narrative. She went from the specifics of her tale to a story with a clear design, but she could never have started with the design and arrived at the specifics. When she was working on the story, she wasn’t thinking of all these manifold surprises and links, she was simply “thinking about people and how they feel,” she says. She was just thinking “about what comes next, about who these people are.”

Of course, plenty of people are more calculated when they think about surprise. Author Monica Wood has two big plot twists in her novel Any Bitter Thing, and though she loves such surprises as a reader, she knows that every novel cannot be constructed with such bombshells. For her novel-in-progress, character surprises are the thing, and as she revises she consciously tries to put something new in each scene. She says, “There’s something the reader discovers that he or she wasn’t expecting. Not that it’s a big shocker, but something new about the character that puts them in a slightly different context, like turning the wheel of a kaleidoscope and things falling into a different shape as it moves.” Dan Chaon, who writes largely for the pleasure of being surprised, adds, “At the same time, at least with some books, I want to create this kind of mechanical ride for the reader. That is the case with the book I am working on right now. I went in knowing there were going to be a couple of things I just wanted to jump out and spin the reader’s head around. When I do that, I am thinking about books that did that to me when I was a kid like Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which has a jaw dropper three-quarters of the way through that transforms everything you knew about the book.”

In a manner of speaking, Chaon’s first draft is where he surprises himself and his subsequent drafts are where he surprises the reader. In Await Your Reply, an intricate mystery about cybercrime and identity, Chaon’s first draft was exploratory, and he didn’t know what was going to happen. In his second draft, he says he was “figuring out how to arrange the tricks that were being played and present them so they emerged naturally from the text. You can’t just have a lame pop out that isn’t prepared for. You lay this clue here and that clue there and cover them, so they don’t feel like clues. There’s a game quality to the second draft.” And though Await Your Reply is a novel with many surprises and a great deal of suspense, Chaon notes that a novel like Mrs. Dalloway is similarly constructed. Even though the Virginia Woolf novel is building to the fact that someone is going to commit suicide, certain material is withheld and revealed, clues planted and uncovered.

Chaon’s story “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted” in Stay Awake is a story that seems to be constructed with consciously planted clues, though we don’t realize that until after the fact. We begin by learning that the protagonist Brandon hasn’t been to the recent funerals of several high school friends, that he doesn’t like rituals, that “he had known a lot of dead people recently.”¹⁸ He appears to be a young man in a slump, too much time on the Internet, a dead-end job bagging groceries, college unfinished. He has what seems like a normal conversation with his first grade teacher, which he nonetheless describes as “really problematic,” noting, “it took a long time to get over.”¹⁹ Brandon is still living in his childhood home, which he allows is “a big part of the problem.” Indeed, he frequently refers to problems, and we realize that he is considering his likely depression as a part of an unsolvable mystery, something central that he can’t get at.²⁰ We learn that his parents have died, that things in the house have deteriorated quite a bit. Of the household issues, the narrator says, “There was, for example, his parents’ bedroom upstairs, which he was naturally hesitant to enter.”²¹ Finally we learn that five years earlier, Brandon came home to a disturbing note on the home’s front door. It was from his parents, and they had both decided to commit suicide. They advised him not to come upstairs to their bedroom but to call the police. This plot twist, prepared for but not announced till eight pages into the story, then forms the basis of another set of clues to a more complex story of the mysteries of Brandon’s childhood, the nature of his brain, and the nightmarish disintegration Brandon starts to see in himself and his household but also in his town and the world at large.

Of course, if you are thinking about how to pace surprises or where and when to plant the clues to the surprises that you will eventually uncover, you also have to at some point think about the nature of your surprise. Is it a real surprise or just a gimmick?

A gimmick is a trick for trickiness’s sake. It is a bit of showing off, clever to be clever, not something that connects to the work’s larger purpose. It’s not a satisfying shock, but an irritating one. A true surprise, says Rachel Contreni-Flynn, “isn’t just for splash. The alteration is meaningful. It points to something deeper, tectonic if you will, in the piece.”

An example of a meaningful alteration, that is also another an example of how surprise can come in the late stage of writing: For many years, Joan Wickersham worked on a novel that was based on her father’s suicide. One day, after his two daughters were grown, Wickersham’s father got up, made some coffee for his wife, and then went upstairs and shot himself in the head. That’s a surprise of the worst sort, and also the kind of thing that it would be hard for a writer to escape as material. Wickersham struggled with her autobiographical novel for years. Because she is a friend, I read the book in a few drafts, and I always thought the drafts were good. I am sure I had a suggestion or two. Mostly I was a booster for the work, but Wickersham was unsatisfied. Eventually she decided to simply turn the book into a memoir. It was better when you knew the particulars were true. Once she’d converted the fiction into nonfiction, I thought, “Great. Well, now you’re done.” But she wasn’t quite. In the eleventh year of writing the book, she had a breakthrough about structure. It came to her as a whim. She would structure the book as an index to suicide, a volume that would consist of entries with titles like “Suicide: day after concern that he will be viewed differently now; Suicide: anger about; Suicide: life summarized in an attempt to illuminate.” In a different writer’s hand, this could have been a gimmick, but it is anything but. It’s a surprising structure through which to tell a story, one that clarifies the point of the exploration. The original structure was chronological, as one might expect, and aspects of the story still do emerge chronologically. But the book that Wickersham had to write was not just about what happened to her father or about answering the “Why did he do it?” question that always attends such deaths. Her book was bigger than that. She titled the book, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order, and the subtitle announces what the unusual structure reveals. The book is about the different ways in which she digested what her father did: a catalog of his story, her experience, and how she came to understand it.

If surprise is the basis of art, then perfection, the well-made, is its enemy. Monica Wood, the author who sometimes apportions a character surprise per scene, happens to be one of the very nicest people I know. She’s generous in general, generous to writers in particular, willing to judge contests that require reading hundreds of books, to read the manuscripts of her (many) friends, and to offer blurbs when asked and even offering the favor when not asked. But this doesn’t mean she doesn’t have high standards. “I was asked to read a book for a blurb, and I turned it down,” she says. “It was a very well-written story about a grieving family with good dialogue and interesting characters. At the end there was not one thing that happened that I didn’t expect—no plot points, no character revelations. Everything seemed to unspool in a smooth way. The things I like best in novels are like wrinkles in cloth. They don’t even quite work. Maybe even the writer doesn’t understand why they are in there. The things we try to iron out in revision sometimes need to stay there. The one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others thing that makes the reader sit up and take notice.”

This sort of comment has been helpful to me when I think about how to mark up undergraduate papers. Even though I have been teaching for almost thirty years, I have a constant debate with myself as I write comments. Am I being too critical? Not critical enough? How to support the writer while also teaching something? Are my students getting the point if I just describe the story back to them, letting them know how I read it? Recently, I hit on the idea of noting “hot spots” in the text. I got the idea from one of my writing exercise books in which the author suggests that students go through first drafts and highlight the “hot spots,” the moments, essentially, of interest, the sections that should be attended to in revision. Probably a hard thing for even experienced writers to do for their own work, but not so hard as an outside party to note the word or sentence or bit of material, the slub in the fabric, that makes the reader perk up.

Suzanne Berne’s The Dogs of Littlefield has many “hot spots.” On the face of it, the novel might seem to be unpromising, focusing, as it does, on the travails of citizens in a comfortable middle-class suburb of Boston, their unhappiness in marriage, their issues with leash laws at the dog park, their fights with their parents, their children’s worries about getting into college, and so forth. And yet, it’s a wonderful novel, in no small part for its beautiful writing, but also for the off-moments, including times when the entirely realistic novel seems to edge into a kind of metaphorical magical realism with the residents of town externalizing their worries as dogs that they actually glimpse, as they go about their lives. These dogs might be the coyotes that plague the town, but they might be something else: fear made manifest. Though the plot of the novel hangs on the fate of an unhappy marriage, a black anthropologist’s research on the mores of the community, and a series of dog poisonings that has frightened the neighborhood, the energy of the novel is in the comic portrayal of the community, the operatic description of the beauty of the natural world, and the intensely troubled, yet entirely believable and compelling, hearts of its residents. What makes the novel work are the ways in which it manages to be a novel of suburban life without being a novel of suburban life, the way in which it slips into something bigger.

With The Dogs of Littlefield, Berne had the ambition of writing her own version of the great American novel, but for her the great American novel had to be small. It couldn’t be big or self-indulgent—she hated that sort of thing when she saw it in other books—but it would have many characters, and it would have an outside visitor who could observe the town and shed some light on it. As she proceeded, Berne says, “Insisting on the smallness of what was going on became more and more interesting to me. I learned an enormous amount from Chekhov, who keeps on insisting on the banality of the characters’ situation and gets you to sympathize with them anyhow.” The surprises in her book, she says, were her effort to “disarm the reader and usually it had to do with scale. I’d have the characters respond in a huge way that the reader would think should be small or visa versa.” An example for her is how a family responds to a boy not getting into college. But another example is the glorious way nature and the seasons are described throughout the book. “The town itself is so beautiful,” Berne says, “and the seasons are these big triumphal parts of the novel. I thought of that in terms of scale. Here is this beautiful place, and no one is noticing in particular. The world’s great passage is going on, and everyone is absorbed in his or her little problems and worlds but locking out the big things around them. The world’s big problems but also the world itself, which is big, mysterious and fascinating.

Berne also notes that for her, surprise comes from trying “as hard as possible not to be sentimental. So if there is a predictable response to something, I would always go in the opposite direction. I am always interested in dissonance.”

Peter Harris, the poet I quoted earlier, received his MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. As part of the requirements for graduation, he presented an hour-long class on surprise. I asked via email for a copy of his talk, and he wrote back, “I don’t have any trace of that talk. It would have been on a floppy disk. My hook was an inaccurate paraphrase of Blanche Dubois, ‘I’ve always relied on the generosity of strangeness.’ The word generosity in its etymological sense of generating new stuff, new perspective. But also increasing the gift of whatever text in which strangeness and surprise turn up.”

Here’s the end of the Peter Harris poem that I quoted earlier, the one about his son surprised by his teacher’s bad temper:

We know the roots of plague,
but when Oedipus finds out, we share his world-
class surprise. How fitting. How right

my boy was. We found another school,
for it was terrible to be jumped
by a ruler cracking on your desk,

by the way a sugar-and-cream voice,
poured on for grownups, soured
into a riot siren, ordering kids to the front

where Mrs. O’Donovan canceled them,
two strokes of a permanent marker—
on the back of each boy’s hand, an X.

Now that I’ve canceled her, I’m embarrassed
it took me twenty years, and I’m surprised
to see my hands are smeared, appalled
to find our lips ensnarled.

I so like the surprise of seeing how the words, “How fitting,” which seem to apply to Oedipus, get elided with the “how right” that applies to Oedipus but also the son; the fact that it is the sugar-and-cream voice, the very dairy product that can curdle that does curdle in the word “soured,” and also that there’s an additional detail about the long ago teacher, coupled with a startling image: she used to put an “X” on the hands of the disobedient. Wow! She did that! And then the intelligence to read this mark as having the emotional effect of canceling the reprimanded child out. Not so hard to be angry with this terrible teacher, but then there’s a twist at the end. Harris seems to leave his subject and turn to art, to this very poem he is constructing, which does have the effect of canceling the teacher out, horrible person as she seems to be, and he wonders why it has taken him twenty years to write the poem, perhaps to do right by his son, beyond the right he did by pulling his son out of school, all those years ago. But then he sees the poem, in part, for what it is, an act of vengeance, and he turns his eyes back to himself, an authority figure (at least in the world of his own poem) also eager to reprimand another. A surprise to see himself so, and a surprise for us, too, not to be left with our condemnation of the bad teacher and thoughts about surprise, but with the poet so willing to indict himself, to expand his vision into this dark place of self-disclosure, a place we know that we, as reader, also belong. In the end, this is the goodie bag we get to take home from the party of the poem.

Given all I have written, I hate to end with a cliché, or at least a writers’ cliché, this from Robert Frost, who even in his own time admitted how often the sentence had been quoted, and it’s been all the more quoted since his death. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”²² But that isn’t entirely true, is it? Sometimes you surprise yourself—as Wickersham and Chaon avow; sometimes the outside world surprises you and you use that surprise in your work, as with Harris’s poem; and sometimes you very intentionally think about how to surprise your reader, as Wood does when she puts a character surprise in each scene and as Berne does when she thinks about how to disarm the reader by inverting expectations. Whatever the case, the idea is to be generous to the reader, to pass on the gift you have received or the one you managed to make yourself, to give them what I wanted from my long-ago boyfriend: a really good book.

 

Debra Spark is the author of five works of fiction, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, Good for the Jews, Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing, and the anthology 20 Under 30. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College

 

Notes

1. Charles McGrath, “Caution: Reading Can Be Hazardous,” The New York Times, Dec 7, 2013.
2. Tobias Wolff, New and Selected Stories (New York: Knopf, 2008), pp. 263–268.
3. Slate Culture Gabfest, No. 280, http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest/2014/01/slate_s_culture_gabfest_on_philomena_comedy_central_s_broad_city_and_scott.html
4. Alice La Plante, Method and Madness, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), p. 3.
5. Peter Harris, Freeing the Hook (Cumberland, ME: Deerbrook Editions, 2013), p. 20.
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anagnorisis; Northrop Frye, “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1963), p. 25.
7. Lore Segal, Half the Kingdom (New York: Melville House Books, 2013).
8. E.M. Forster, “The Raison d’Etre of Criticism of the Arts,” May 1, 1947, talk at Harvard University.
9. All quotes from writers are from conversations with Debra Spark, unless otherwise indicated.
10. Pamela Erens, The Virgins (Portland and New York: Tin House Books, 2013), p. 15.
11. Ibid, p. 21.
12. Ibid, p. 70.
13. Ibid, p. 60.
14. Joan Wickersham, The News from Spain (New York: Knopf, 2012), p. 141.
15. Ibid, p. 169.
16. Ibid, p. 150.
17. Ibid, p. 158.
18. Dan Chaon, Stay Awake (New York: Ballantine Books, 2012), p. 30.
19. Ibid, p. 32.
20. Ibid, p. 33.
21. Ibid, p. 35.
22. Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” The Collected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1939).