Mystery

Case Histories

| ruthpelletier

By Kate Atkinson

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You know the old saying, ‘Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good’?

Books, like people, are never perfect. They are rarely even excellent. The lucky ones, the once-in-a-generation books, are perfect along only one axis, but those are usually deficient along most others.

None of the Great Books are perfect; often, though, they are powerful in many dimensions. They are well-plotted, well-written, the characters are strong, the imagining vivid. What makes books really excellent is never that they are perfect, but often that they are consistently strong.

But what about books that are only excellent in one or two ways? Books that are lopsided?

I have great fondness for lopsided books. Not mediocre books – I resent those – but imperfect ones. Good books, strong books, but ones with clear and conspicuous failings.

Kate Atkinson has only recently bubbled up into my consciousness. I don’t remember how I first heard of her, but it was one of those things: as soon as I had first registered her name, I started hearing it everywhere.

Atkinson, a novelist, writes both stand-alone novels and a series of murder mysteries centered around the fictional detective Jackson Brodie. I purchased one of each, but I’ve been going through a bit of a murder mystery kick lately, so I started with the detective novel. ‘Case Histories’ is the first novel of the series, and is non-traditional in structure: rather than following one mystery, it blends three together:

On a summer night in 1970, 3-year-old Olivia Land vanishes from a tent in the backyard where she has been camping with her sister, Amelia. Her body will never be found. One summer day in 1994, 18-year-old Laura Wyre is working at her father’s law office when a man in a bright yellow sweater walks in and cuts her throat. He is never caught. One evening in 1979, Michelle Fletcher, a young mother whose world is unraveling into post-partum chaos, splits her husband’s head with an ax after he wakes their baby.

All three of these cases will converge, decades later, on Jackson Brodie. Brodie, who has retired from the police force and is working as a private detective, is something of a mess. His wife has left him for another man, and he is too chaotic to be a great parent to his beloved daughter, Marlee. His most reliable client is Binky Rain, an octogenarian with no family who is convinced that someone is stealing her cats.

Atkinson is a better writer than she is a plotter. ‘Case Histories’ eschews the tropes of normal murder novels. Important events happen off-screen; the murderer will not necessarily turn out to be a known character; bad guys are not always brought to justice, and narrators are not reliable. All of which might have been ok, except that the story-telling is uneven. Atkinson leans too much on sudden resolutions and improbable coincidences. Protagonists from different stories wander in and out of each other’s plot lines, people inherit improbably large sums of money suddenly, and, weirdly, everyone seems to live on the same block in Cambridge (England).

Too much important stuff happens off-screen. As a technique, the sudden jump forward to a later point in the action can be effective, but a little goes a long way. If you use it a lot, if a lot of your chapters end on cliff-hangers, only to be picked up on the next page two months later, it’s jarring for the reader. It starts to feel like watching a TV show while skipping episodes.

However, Atkinson is a great writer. Her prose is a blast to read: funny, readable, colorful. She writes well – the prose is sophisticated and excellent – but her tone is conversational, idiomatic. Her imagination is vivid: Atkinson prefers to spend her words inside her characters’ psyches, which she depicts with winning detail.

There are real and salient problems with the book, unmistakable and frustrating. However, in a weird way, they only made me like ‘Case Histories’ more. Atkinson’s prose is so engaging and lively that the plot feels a little beside the point. Most murder mysteries, the plot is the whole point; in ‘Case Histories’, the plot is merely an excuse for the characters to interact with each other via Atkinson’s sparkling writing.

I genuinely believe that, if ‘Case Histories’ had the robust and well-paced plot it deserved, I would love it less. There is something idiosyncratic about the slap-dash plot against the vividly-imagined interior lives of the characters, something charming. The point of this book is the prose: its light-heartedness, its humor, its specificity:

Kate Atkinson

“Julia started sneezing again. It was always embarrassing when Julia had a sneezing fit, one after the other, explosive, uncontrollable sounds, like a cannon firing. Amelia had once heard someone say that you could tell what a woman’s orgasm would be like if you heard her sneeze. (As if you would want to know). Just recollecting this thought made her uncomfortable. In case this was common knowledge, Amelia had made a point ever since then of never sneezing in public if she could help it. “For God’s sake, take more Zyrtec,” she said crossly to Julia.” (p. 127)

“He felt absurdly vulnerable, lying there in the chair, prostrate and helpless, subject to the whims of Sharon and her silent dental nurse…Jackson tried not to think about this, nor about that scene in Marathon Man, and instead worked on conjuring up a picture of France. He could grow vegetables, he’d never grown a vegetable in his life, Josie had been the gardener…In France, the vegetables would probably grow themselves anyway. All that warm fertile soil. Tomatoes, peaches. Vines, could he grow vines? Olives, lemons, figs – it sounded biblical. Imagine watching the tendrils creeping, the fruit plumping, oh God, he was getting an erection (at the idea of vegetables, what was wrong with him?). Panic made him swallow and gag on his own saliva. Sharon returned the chair to an upright position and said, “All right?” her head cocked to one side in an affectation of concern while he choked noisily. The silent dental nurse handed him a plastic cup of water.” (p. 146)

The truth is, despite its deficiencies as a murder mystery, I loved this book. I am absolutely going to read more of this series – the prose is irresistible. Atkinson isn’t a perfect novelist, and ‘Case Histories’ isn’t a Great Book, but it was so much fun to read. It is lopsided in the best way, lopsided in a way that makes you love it more. It’s special.

Gone Girl

| ruthpelletier

By Gillian Flynn

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I know that everyone loves ‘Gone Girl’. I mean, I love ‘Gone Girl’. I read it, years ago, in one swallow: a beautiful summer afternoon spent inside, on the couch, unable to tear myself away. I have a lot of respect for it as a novel, the craft, the excellent execution of it.

But the other day I finally got around to watching the movie (which I also think was competent and gripping), and was reminded of something that tweaked me about the story, and, frankly, about the genre in general.

A little context, for the two people alive who haven’t read the book or seen the movie: On their five year wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne’s wife Amy vanishes from their home. The first half of ‘Gone Girl’ is a murder mystery, told both from Nick’s perspective in the days following her disappearance, and from excerpts of Amy’s diary during the years of their courtship and early marriage. As the days pass, more and more evidence emerges, all of which points to Nick having killed Amy. He has been having an affair. He has just taken out a large life insurance policy on her. Amy’s best friend comes forward and tells police that Amy feared that her husband would kill her.

It’s a masterpiece of unreliable narration, and Flynn manages to wind her readers through almost two hundred pages of Nick Dunne’s first person account without ever revealing whether or not he murdered his wife. I can’t really understate how impressed I am by her ability to do that. Two hundred pages of first person narration without revealing, in either direction, whether or not that person is a murderer? It’s a real high-wire act of suspenseful dubiety, and it’s completely successful.

However, after a deft, tense first half, Flynn abandons her well-constructed ambiguity and turns to that favorite device of genre fiction: the psychopath.

Amy is alive, of course. She has elaborately, painstakingly framed her husband for a murder that has not happened. And now she is free, living in disguise and watching her brilliant revenge play out from a safe distance.

The psychopathic genius is a tempting plot device. He is a human without humanity  He is capable of any evil, smarter than his opponents, and conveniently unencumbered by normal emotional frailties.  There aren’t any characterological weaknesses to limit him, and so he can enact any outlandish deviousness his author dreams up for him.

However, there are two big problems with the meticulous psychopath.

First, he is totally unrealistic. In real life, antisocial personalities are characterized not only by a lack of empathy, but also by impulsivity, recklessness, and unlawful behavior.  Flynn’s psychopath, however, shares with her fictional brethren a distinct lack of impetuosity.  The premise of ‘Gone Girl’ rests on the ability of a flamboyant sociopath to plan minutely and far in advance, to mask their thoughts and emotions and to forego any short-term satisfaction in order to execute an elaborate and excruciating revenge.

In real life, this is very un-psychopathic behavior.  The diagnostic criteria of antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”, “consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations”, and “impulsivity and failure to plan ahead”.  It is striking that these traits are not only absent in Flynn’s psychopath, they would severely limit, if not completely obviate, her ability to plan and carry out her scheme.

Gillian Flynn

Second, the literary psychopath isn’t actually interesting. While he may have the immediate magnetism of a car wreck, he isn’t actually a character.  He has no internal conflict; he is all plot. 

Now, that can be OK. When plot is all that matters, he’s fine.  That’s why he does such reliable work in cop dramas, soap operas, and beach reads. But he isn’t a person – he’s a tool that an author can use to advance action. And he’s very useful, obviously, but this utility has caused him to be badly overused in fiction.  Once, he was shocking, novel, outre. Now, he’s everywhere, committing ever more elaborate crimes, devising ever more esoteric tortures for the rest of us. He’s become predictable.

Which is a shame, because the beauty of the first half of ‘Gone Girl’ was how difficult it was to predict. The tension Flynn manages to build in the first half of the novel is effective and affecting.  The different early perspectives offered by Nick and Amy Dunne make the reader question not only the reality of their marriage, but also the ability of any two people to ever really know each other. The first, better, half of ‘Gone Girl’ is a completely different book: one about intimacy, about whether it is even possible.  It offers a view of marriage that is not a shared life, but merely coincident delusions.  It is a dark vision, and it is much more compelling than the Dances with Psychos that the book becomes.

Rebecca

| ruthpelletier

By Daphne du Maurier

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I read ‘Rebecca’ once, years ago, in high school, and I remembered nothing about it save the general tone and premise. I had conceived an idea, however, that ‘Rebecca’ was a maligned novel. While very famous, it is not usually included among the Great Books – people tend to think of it as sort of romance novel-adjacent. I have always assumed that this was an injustice: that if ‘Rebecca’ had been written by a man (instead of by a woman with the absurdly romantic name ‘Daphne du Maurier’), it would be a great deal better celebrated.

‘Rebecca’ begins with our narrator, a young and painfully shy woman who will never be named (we will know her only as the second Mrs. de Winter), working as a lady’s companion in Monte Carlo. One day, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome man twice her own age. Her companion tells her that he is the owner of Manderley, a beautiful English estate, and that he is a widower. His late wife, Rebecca, drowned tragically only a year ago and Maxim, our narrator is told, has been deranged by grief ever since.

After a perplexing and whirlwind romance, our narrator marries Maxim and returns with him to Manderley. Once there, she finds herself reminded constantly of the late Rebecca, stifled by her vanished presence. Rebecca, who ran Manderley, who commanded the love and loyalty of the servants (especially Mrs. Danvers, the head of the household), who threw the best parties in the neighborhood, who was brave and witty and elegant and exceptionally beautiful. Slowly, the second Mrs. de Winter will become obsessed with her predecessor, with her marriage to Maxim, and with her strange death.

As someone who has always felt that there are many more great books than Great Books, I have always been a little bit indignant on behalf of ‘Rebecca’. We have tended, as a culture, to relegate novels by women about women to lesser status – they are Entertainment, not Art. Chick Lit, as a named genre, is both real and offensive. It may that there are books which, due to their subject matter, are more likely to appeal (on a population level) to women than to men, but that should not exclude them from Category: Literature.

In my opinion, greatness transcends subject matter. We do not consider books Great because their contents appeal equally to all people. Think about ‘Moby Dick’, with its endless passages about the processing of whale oil. Think about ‘Anna Karenina’, and that middle section where Levin just threshes wheat for a dog’s age. For god’s sake, think about Proust! ‘In Search of Lost Time’ is considered one of humanity’s great artistic works and it contains within itself whole novels worth of esoterica! Given this literary landscape, I fail entirely to see why romance should be considered a niche interest (women only!).

On the other hand, if I am being fair, I should mention that perhaps ‘Rebecca’ is Not-Great for reasons other than its feminine perspective. It is a true Gothic Romance, with all the requisite elements: a mysterious marriage, a rambling spooky house, creepy servants, dark aristocratic family secrets. Romances (Gothic or otherwise) are often sneered at, in part because they tend not to be terribly sophisticated, from a literary perspective.

And while there is more perhaps atmosphere and less bodice-ripping in ‘Rebecca’ than in other romances, it’s not sophisticated, nor is it subtle. Romances don’t aspire to plausibility, and they do not intend to instruct. They are meant to be absorbing rather than enriching, and, certainly, I do not feel enriched by ‘Rebecca’.

Lack of moral nourishment does not make a book bad, obviously, but I’m not convinced, having reread it, that ‘Rebecca’ is good so much as it is entertaining. But it is entertaining, and to a degree that required serious skill on du Maurier’s part. It’s difficult to build an entire novel around a character who never appears, especially if that character is cast in the role of villain.

Villains have to appear in stories, because they need either to vanquish or be vanquished, which they cannot do off-screen. You can spin them out, keep them in the wings for a long time, but eventually, we need to confront them. I don’t know that I can think of a single other story where the villain never makes an appearance.

Part of the reason, I think, that villains must come into the light is because, if they don’t actually appear, they can’t hurt us. And if they can’t hurt us, they can’t scare us. A menacing but unrealized presence hovering off-screen might be creepy, but it isn’t a villain. A villain must exert force, must act on other characters, and it must act, at least once, with the audience for a witness.

Daphne du Maurier

What ‘Rebecca’ does beautifully, though, is cheat that requirement on a technicality. Rebecca herself is a marvelous villain: perfect, beautiful, malicious, and dead. And her deadness is a strength, not a weakness. As our narrator herself says, “If there were some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight with her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her any more. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too strong for me.” (p. 234)

There are two reasons why I think it works to have Rebecca be a villain from beyond the grave. The first is that, while Rebecca might be dead, Manderley is still inhabited by her avatar, Mrs. Danvers, her devoted and psychotic servant. If Rebecca is dead, Mrs. Danvers can still act on her behalf.

The second is that our narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter, is so terrorized by the memory of her husband’s first wife that Rebecca feels very present to the reader. She may not be alive, but she dominates the novel as completely as she dominates the second Mrs. de Winter.

These two mechanisms allow du Maurier to achieve what might otherwise be impossible: to make a dead villain into an active and effective villain. And effective villains, really effective villains, are artistic achievements in their own right. No work of art is perfect – perhaps work can achieve greatness through one of its facets. We give Oscars for aspects of a film: acting, directing, sound-editing. So while ‘Rebecca’ might not be Great Art, it does have a Great Villain. Surely that earns it a slot in the Literature Hall of Fame.

Djinn Patrol On the Purple Line

| ruthpelletier

By Deepa Anaparra

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

So, one of the things that happens when you read a lot (like, a lot) is that you start to get a feel for stories.

Storytelling is like any well-developed art form: it has a sort of syntax all its own, with signifiers and allusions and conventions which become more and more familiar the more time you spend immersed in the medium.

Let me give you an example: you’re watching a horror movie. There are some teenagers, some are boys, some are girls. One of the girls is hot, blonde, and a little, er, wild. The group of teenagers all enter the haunted house/abandoned asylum/house of mirrors, and shortly thereafter the blonde girl sneaks off with a boy to screw around.

In that moment, you 100% know she’s going to die, horribly, very soon. Everyone knows she’s going to die, horribly, very soon, because that blonde girl isn’t actually a character – she’s a trope. She’s a signifier, a syntactical element, placed there in reference to a tradition (repulsive, reductive, misogynistic though it may be), placed there to orient you within the framework not of this specific story, but within all stories.

That’s a particularly unsubtle example, I know, but stories are filled with elements like this, and when you live, as I do, in stories, they become a second language. Familiarity with this language allows you to grasp, quickly, the dense web of references that most stories reside within, and, often, it can tell you, like Chekov’s Gun, what is going to happen long before it actually does.

If you get good at this language, you can often predict with eerie precision what’s going to happen in a book or movie. And, as in the case of our Slutty Blonde above, the more stereotyped a story is, the easier it is to spot the future coming.

I’m good at this language, and I’m rarely wrong about how a story ends, which is both fun and slightly boring.

‘Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line‘ positively bristles with signifiers. It’s incredibly obvious what kind of story it’s going be: everything about this book, the title, the cover art, the premise, promise you a funny, poignant, humane romp.

‘Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line‘ is the story of Jai. Jai is nine years old, and lives with his mother, father, and older sister in a sprawling Indian slum. Jai is undistinguished by any particular talent, he daydreams through school, lacks his sister’s athletic talent or his parents’ work ethic. But Jai nourishes a secret dream of being a television detective, and when children of the slum start disappearing, he decides he’s exactly the right person to solve the case, albeit with the help of his two best friends Pari and Faiz (and an adopted slum dog named Samosa).

A funny, poignant, humane romp, right?

The novel is written primarily in Jai’s voice. Or, to put it another way, it’s written in the voice of a nine year old boy. This device is usually extremely irritating, but Anaparra really pulls it off, and Jai is mostly a wonderful narrator: detailed, whimsical, bewildered, and funny. Really funny, actually – Anaparra captures very well the slightly misaligned certainty with which children interpret their world, the way that they come to very particular conclusions which are often a little askew, but reasonable based on the info they have. The workings of the world as seen through Jai’s eyes are arbitrary, magical, hilarious. Hilarious, at least, until, suddenly, they aren’t.

You know that old saw, that good literature shows, and doesn’t tell? Well, the dirty little secret is that almost everyone tells, at least a little. It makes sense – it must be nearly irresistible for authors to tell. Imagine it: you write this whole book, construct characters and metaphors and conflict and catharsis and you, presumably, do it for a reason – how can you resist pushing your audience in the right interpretive direction? Even just hinting at them what lesson they are meant to draw from your work?

Deepa Anaparra

Anaparra doesn’t tell, at all – she just describes. And she doesn’t provide catharsis, either, and it is perhaps this, more than anything, which takes her story and changes it into something else, a story I absolutely didn’t see coming. The deliberate lack of catharsis is, I think, exactly why she worked so hard to make ‘Djinn Patrol‘ look like a completely different kind of book than it is – it’s why she worked so hard to disguise it as a light-hearted mystery romp. Because mystery romps always, always get endings.

Think about it this way: imagine this premise (misfit detectives) in another setting. Imagine it, say, in a quaint English village in the 1930s – you’ve got Jeeves and Wooster. Or in a working-class Indiana neighborhood in the 1980’s – you’ve got ‘Stranger Things’. Or ‘Harriet the Spy’ or ‘The Adventures of Alex Mack’ or Hercule Poirot or Veronica Mars or any of the dozens and dozens of stories of unlikely people running circles around the actual police. This is one of the most beloved genres of stories that humans tell, and we know exactly how it’s supposed to end.

But ‘Djinn Patrol’ doesn’t end the way we expect it to – it doesn’t end at all. And that’s because what all the wacky detective stories you’ve ever read have had in common was this: the lives that they described were valued. But the lives of Jai and his friends (and his parents and his friends’ parents) aren’t valued, not by society at large. And so it’s not that their stories don’t end: all stories end. It’s that no one cares enough about them to figure out what the end is, and to tell it.

‘Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line‘ is NOT a funny, poignant, humane romp, NOT a zany, misfit detective novel. It’s actually a crushing demonstration of the disposability of human life, of how little human society values the lives of the poor, even if the lives in question belong to children.

I have come away loving this book, and not just because it surprised me. What I loved more is the way it manages to deliver a brutal message completely without pedantry. There is power in the juxtaposition that Anaparra sets up here: tropes badly misapplied, the total refusal to release her readers into the familiarity of an ending they expect. It’s breathtaking, it really is, and I know that sounds unlikely – I had this one pegged a beach read, too. But it’s not, and it’s so clever how she pulls it off. By denying you, her reader, the comfort of a resolution, she is showing you what the lives of her characters really lack: sufficient value, in the eyes of their fellow human beings, to get an ending.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

| ruthpelletier

By Olga Tokarczuk

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“The fact that we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future is a terrible mistake in the programming of the world. It should be fixed at the first opportunity.” (p. 271)

There is a tricky kind of novel, rare and hard to pull off: the Novel of Dubious Guilt, First Person. ‘The Turn of the Screw‘ is this kind of novel; ‘Gone Girl‘ is this kind of novel; ‘His Bloody Project‘ is this kind of novel.

In novels of this kind, a protagonist, speaking directly to the reader, relates a series of events in which they are implicated without revealing the extent of their involvement. Usually, but not always, it is a murder. The trick of it is: the reader must not be able to discern whether or not their narrator is guilty or innocent. They must not be able to trust the narrative, even as they invest in it by reading further. They must keep always before them the possibility either that the narrator is lying, or that the narrator is mad.

It’s hard to pull this off. If you make a narrator too cagey, if they act suspicious to their reader, their guilt will become apparent. But too much information, or obvious psychosis, also destroys the ambiguity, and once a reader has “figured out” what really happened, the effect is ruined.

Shame on me, I had never heard of Olga Tokarczuk. This really isn’t forgivable – one of her previous novels, ‘Flights‘, won the Man Booker International Prize, and she herself won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018. But I had never heard of her: I picked up ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ solely because I found the title irresistible, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to end up being the best book I read this year.

Janina Duszejko lives in rural Poland, near the Czech border. She is a teacher, an aging astrology enthusiast, an intense lover of animals. She has only a few friends, but she is known in her community: she cares for the summer dachas of the city people during the hard winters, and she has frequent confrontations with the local hunters. In her free time, she and her friend Dizzy translate Blake into Polish; she pores over the star charts of everyone she meets, a side project she has to prove her theory that the moment of a person’s birth contains, complete and unchangeable, the moment of their death. She had two dogs, her little girls, but they went missing the year before and she has never been able to find them.

One night in the middle of the winter, her neighbor Oddball comes to her house in the middle of the night to tell her that their mutual neighbor Bigfoot has died. He has choked on a bone from a deer that he poached, a habit for which Janina loathes him. As Oddball and Janina make the body decent for the police, Janina looks for Bigfoot’s papers – she wants to know his birthday, to draw his chart and add his death to her charts. She finds a photograph which shocks her; she does not tell us what is in it, but it sparks a series of events which leads to the deaths of four more men.

Over the next year, prominent men in the community begin to die in suspicious circumstances. The commandant of police falls down a well. A priest burns down in his own church. A fur farmer is found in an animal trap. The only thing that the men have in common: they were all hunters. Deer tracks are found near one body – fox tracks near another. Rumors begin to swirl around the community: the animals are taking their revenge.

Janina is a spectacular narrator: smart and observant and sad and sly and barking mad all at the same time. Tokarczuk, even in translation, is a beautiful writer, and this is prose like I’ve never quite encountered before. It’s a blend of real weirdness, humor, loneliness and wile. It’s pathos and bathos and rage.

“Spring is just a short interlude, after which the mighty armies of death advance; they’re already besieging the city walls. We live in a state of siege. If one takes a close look at each fragment of a moment, one might choke with terror. Within our bodies disintegration inexorably advances; soon we shall fall sick and die. Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve them in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.” (p. 124)

Janina’s focus, her obsession, is animals. She has made what appears to be a small imaginative leap, but one which makes a permanent, wrathful outsider of her: she believes that animals are the moral equals of people. That they have souls, intelligences, if not identical to ours, like enough to warrant protections equal to the ones we offer each other. She views humans who kill, cage, or eat animals with the same revulsion you would feel for an unrepentant murderer. To a cannibal.

Olga Tokarczuk

“So I spoke, using wise words…

“”You’ll say it’s just one Boar,” I continued. “But what about the deluge of butchered meat that falls on our cities day by day like never-ending, apocalyptic rain? This rain heralds slaughter, disease, collective madness, the obfuscation and contamination of the Mind. For no human heart is capable of bearing so much pain. The whole, complex human psyche has evolved to prevent Man from understanding what he is really seeing. To stop the truth from reaching him by wrapping it in illusion, in idle chatter. The world is a prison of suffering, so constructed that in order to survive one must inflict pain on others…What sort of world is this? Someone’s body is made into shoes, into meatballs, sausages, a bedside rug, someone’s bones are boiled to make broth…Shoes, sofas, a shoulder bag made of someone’s belly, keeping warm with someone else’s fur, eating someone’s body, cutting it into bits and frying it in oil…Can it really be true? Is this nightmare really happening? This mass killing, cruel, impassive, automatic, without any pangs of conscience, without the slightest pause for thought, though plenty of thought is applied to ingenious philosophies and theologies. What sort of world is this, where killing and pain are the norm?” (p. 107)

Because Janina is so single-minded, ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ isn’t a true mystery. By the “reveal”, you have a pretty good sense of what’s going on, but, at that point, you’ve come far enough with Janina that you are thoroughly on her side.

The trick of those mystery narrators, those Did-I-Or-Didn’t-I novels, is how do you sympathize with narrator who might be a murderer? ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ is a neat twist on this: how do you sympathize with a narrator when you are both murderers, she in your eyes, you in hers? Can the charm of her prose, the righteousness of her cause, the clarity of her vision, bring you along with her, make you a kind of accomplice?

The answer is yes, emphatically yes. Janina is as winning a narrator as I have encountered in years; ‘Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead‘ is a great love. A book this good, the first thing I do is buy something else by the author. ‘Flights‘ won Tokarczuk a Man Booker – I’ll start with that. Books this good are rare – when you find them, follow them.

A Unified Theory of Novels

| ruthpelletier

So, I’d like to do something a little different this week, and instead of talking about one book which I finished in the past seven days, I’d like to talk about novels in general.

I said something a little while ago: “It doesn’t, for example, make any sense to complain that there weren’t enough battles between zombies and werewolves in ‘The Notebook’ – ‘The Notebook’ isn’t that kind of story.” But when I thought more about it, I felt that I had, as usual, been glib. And not merely because I have never read ‘The Notebook’, but because while I believe that this is a true and self-evident statement, why is it true?

It’s true because there are different kinds of novels.

I don’t mean Good versus Bad novels – I mean that there are different categories of novels. Partly, yes, this is what we’re talking about when we talk about genre: romance versus horror, but even within that great non-genre, Literature, there are different categories of literary novel. And I know that this is obvious to everyone, but it bears a little reiteration, because it has implications which we rarely examine with any care.

Let me put it this way:

Which is the better novel: ‘Ulysses‘ or ‘Jurassic Park‘?

There are a lot of ways to answer this question.

You might say: ‘Ulysses’, because it is a technical accomplishment of such complexity and beauty that it transformed the very idea of the novel.

You might say: ‘Ulysses’, because that’s the book that people are more impressed when I say I’ve read it.

You might say: ‘Jurassic Park’, because more people like it.

You might say: ‘Ulysses’, because more informed people like it.

You might say: ‘Jurassic Park’, because, unlike ‘Ulysses’, it’s actually fun to read.

None of these answers is quite satisfying, is it? Yes, ‘Jurassic Park’ is more entertaining, but ‘Ulysses’ was more complex. How can you adjudicate ‘better’ in a case like this?

The problem, of course, is that the question is nonsensical. Neither novel is strictly ‘better’, because they are different kinds of novels, and so have different novelistic goals.

Over the years, I’ve come to think about three broad categories of novels (in my head, I call them Tiers). Within each Tier, a novel can be either successful or not successful, which means that there is such a thing as a Very Good Tier 1 novel, which is, for my money, ‘better’ than a Very Bad Tier 3 novel, in so far as goodness can be read into execution of intention.

These are my Tiers:

Tier 1 Novels: Plot

Tier 1 novels are novels where the primary purpose of the novel is plot. ‘Plot’, in this case, is distinct from ‘story’ – most, if not all novels, have a story of some sort, but not all novels are plot-driven.

Plot-driven novels are characterized by action. Action moves the novel forward, and action is the necessary resolution of the plot. ‘Action’ does not necessarily, of course, mean a sword fight – action can also be the discovery of a murderer, or the culmination of a magical quest, or an exorcism.

Because, of course, most of what are traditionally called ‘genre novels’ are contained in this tier: fantasy, murder mysteries, techno-thrillers.

My favorite Tier 1 novelist is Michael Crichton (as is probably clear from my obsession with ‘Jurassic Park’). I’ve read everything he’s written, even that pirate one. I could wrote a whole essay on my deep love of a Crichton premise. Stephen King is another beloved Tier 1 novelist for me; so was George R. R. Martin, before he ghosted us all.

Tier 2 Novels: People

Tier 2 novels are novels in which the story isn’t, necessarily, plot-driven: these novels might be novels of character development, emotional crisis, personal tragedy or triumph.

Tier 2 novels are not characterized by subject matter – they are characterized by their limitation. Tier 2 novels are only about what they are about. They do not, by design or failure, transcend their own story. If they are a story of a young man’s descent into madness, then they are only about that particular young man and his particular madness – they are not a metaphor for anything larger.

This is not necessarily a comment on the value of these novels; on the contrary, Tier 2 includes some of the most absorbing novels I have ever read. They are often powerful, moving stories, stories you may perhaps relate strongly to, but they are stories from which you do not learn anything about the greater problems of humanity.

Jonathan Franzen is the exemplar Tier 2 novelist: his novels are beautifully imagined, richly, even elaborately, detailed, intricate and specific. But his protagonists, his beautifully-imagined protagonists, are what his stories are about. They aren’t about you or me, us, the great mass of humanity – they are about the people that appear in their pages, and no one else.

Sometimes, a Tier 2 novels transcends category: it is a story only about the specific people and specific incidents described, but it is so beautiful and perfect, so finely and humanely drawn, that it feels as though it touches on something universal, and so becomes about the common human experience without ever becoming a metaphor. Elena Ferrante’s novels are, in my opinion, the best of example of this kind of category-straddle: indisputably, to me, Tier 2 novels, the depiction of the two women at the heart of those books is so deft and true that it becomes about us all, in the ways that we are all alike.

Tier 3 Novels: Metaphor

Tier 3 novels are novels which transcend the specifics of their story. They are novels which use their specific stories to tell a bigger story, a more universal story. Their characters are metaphors, archetypes, allegories, from which we might learn something about ourselves. They can be bad or good, successful or unsuccessful, but their characters or stories mean something more than the specific circumstances that afflict them.

Tier 3 novels are the novels we are all used to thinking of as “great” novels. Most of the canonically “great” novels are Tier 3 novels, but this is, I think, a limitation of the canon.

Of course, many of my own most-loved novels are Tier 3 novels: ‘East of Eden‘, ‘Infinite Jest‘, anything by Graham Greene, ‘The Age of Innocence‘, ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil‘, by George Saunders – all Tier 3. Most of the really excellent or seminal science fiction, Tier 3: Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Asimov, Dick, Herbert, Gibson, Le Guin, you name it: all Tier 3.

And, of course, some of the most bloated, irritating ‘classics’, the books with which we are all flogged in high school, are also Tier 3: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, ‘The Sound and the Fury’, ‘The Golden Bowl’, ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by Lawrence Durrell – all Tier 3, lord help us.

But some great classics, books beloved and admired, are Tier 2’s: most of Jane Austen’s novels, ‘Brideshead Revisited‘ by Evelyn Waugh, anything by E. M. Forster.

I don’t argue for the perfection of this system. Some of my favorite novels defy categorization according to my system:

‘I Love Dick‘, by Chris Kraus, ‘World War Z‘ by Max Brooks (no, I’m not kidding), ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler‘, by Italo Calvino – what are they?. Or how about something like ‘Bleak House‘, by Dickens? You feel as though it ought to be Tier 3, it is Dickens after all, but is it? Only in the most insipid sense: a fable about how goodness will be rewarded and wickedness punished, but on that level the book is garbage anyway – ‘Bleak House’ lives in its specific characters and prose, so maybe it would be happier in Tier 2.

Or how about ‘The Screwtape Letters‘: it’s clearly a Tier 3, but it isn’t a metaphor, it’s a fantasy, and so in some ways feels more like a Tier 1 novel than anything else. It’s a fable, an exposition, it’s barely a novel, more a series of lectures in a funny framing.

But, for better or worse, this is how I think about novels, and my tiers have given me a way to love and exalt ‘Jurassic Park‘ as much as I love and exalt ‘Infinite Jest‘, a way to express what I feel: that these are books of equal quality, in which I might take equal joy, because they are trying to do different things. There are a lot of ways to be good, and ‘literature’ is just too broad a category.