The Expanding Novel

Issue 135

Troy, Turkey 2013

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Here is a short sentence that describes a playground lesson that just about everybody, sooner or later, begins to grasp:

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.

And this description—from the C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—comes alive in its expansiveness. In just a few words, we have more than an impression, we have a vibrant, lifelike character, who has, at least for me, grown beyond the page. I know this character. I know her moods. I know her looks. I know how she reacts to slights and frustrations and even her own mistakes. I’ve seen her on the subway, I’ve dealt with her on the phone, I’ve overheard her in restaurants, and I am certain, in fact, that you have too.

In a thirty-eight word sentence, we have this curious sensation of inflation, of a character with idiosyncrasies, behaviors, and attributes that aren’t explicit on the page—which is precisely the point at which a novel seems to awaken. Of course this expansiveness from a fictional character isn’t common. Only the rare novel offers this spirit, despite the intentions of most writers. In the typical novel the character comes across as constricted, featureless, and limited by the writer’s words, there’s no sensation of depth beyond what’s visible; and these flat characters are stuck repeating their lines, forever imprisoned inside their stories.

You can hear the distinction if you listen closely to a conversation about a novel. Is the conversation limited to the storyline? With the characters a bit like marionettes upon a stage—bound to just a few moves? Or does the individuality of the characters seem to extrapolate outward? Does the conversation veer toward unwritten assumptions? Could you, if you arrived late, believe that the character was a real person? It is the slightest change in tone and emphasis but it is a monumental change in experience.

Although the crafting of a fictional character demands more than a photorealistic portrait, and any novel that’s simply a mirror for the world probably needs another draft. I don’t pick up novels as a substitute for experience, nor do I read about characters as a substitute for conversation—and for exactly the same reason I don’t expect nor want my paintings to be photographs. A list of renowned painters isn’t a list of painters that surpasses the realism of photographs. It is a list of painters with a distinct, expansive sensibility—we’re captivated by a painter’s individuality, by subjects that aren’t constrained to a canvas, with the ability of brushstrokes to convey a perspective. And that’s remarkably close to how we describe our most renowned writers.

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Here’s a sweeping and oversimplified and incomplete generalization: we can encapsulate the entire history of literature as a gradual narrowing of perspective. We have been slowly opening the aperture on the lens—with our literature now providing us with a view that’s closer but sharper. Our earliest stories might be described as distant, with a narrator that stands above the action and looks down, the tale collective, social, suitable for a lyrical epic; while our more contemporary stories thrust us into the individual and particular, the narrator somehow closer, the story intimate, personal, even familiar.

One way to consider Athenian drama and Homer, for instance, is through a narrative voice that’s just off stage, with the storyteller breathing life into the characters while we watch, the perspective omniscient, all-encompassing. But that’s less common as the centuries pass, and there’s no shock once we start detecting hints of a more contemporary individual in Dante and Shakespeare or in the writing of Montaigne. The preponderance of fictional stories still come closer to we rather than I, and most storytellers remain in the distance, even if they’re now a bit closer to the stage.

Of course those shackles eventually drop, and we end up with an explosion of novels that are shaped in a way that modern readers would recognize—with Flaubert and Austen and Dostoevsky some notable names hurdling past the sociological and into the psychological, as the old stories about groups and archetypes have become—or have expanded into—stories about individuals. Of course the vanguard changes the lines before anyone catches their breath, and somehow, once again, nudge the perspective even closer, so that in the writing of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf we’ve gone so far inside that we’ve jettisoned any notion of narrative, leaving us with just the individual, with the writer’s voice, with the inhabiting of a sensibility.

If you want the message of Ulysses, if you want to extract a summary, you need every single word. Because there’s nothing that you can extract from the pages without loss, as every sentence is necessary to capture character. In the last hundred years of literary pivots—including many attempts to quash this focus on the individual—there’s a reasonable argument that, in general, the tendency has been a continued narrowing. The aperture of the lens has opened wider: the details continue to sharpen while the scene continues to narrow. Which means that nearly all conversations about literature today focus on sensibility and voice and perspective. Nobody should be surprised by the popularity of auto-fiction this century, nor is there anything shocking in the ubiquity of memoirs that include fictional characters, or even in all the controversies about who has the authority to write particular fictional stories—as we’ve shrunk every sentence to a mark of identity.

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One strength of the novel, part of the reason why we continue to read novels, is for the expansiveness that’s inherent in the form—a novel that’s artful and vibrant and memorable can’t be reduced to its pages. A simplification doesn’t just sever a little bit of enjoyment or suspense or subtract unnecessary details—it also severs the novel’s sensibility and perspective and voice. If you could somehow simplify the story to a message, then you wouldn’t need the novel. Although it is rarely stated, nearly everyone has this intuition. To believe otherwise is to believe that Moby-Dick is about whaling, that Crime and Punishment is about solving a murder, or that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is about 20th Century Naples.

For a character to emerge from a page, alive, particular, vibrant, the aperture needs to be open, the granular aspects visible, but there’s a wordless quality, too, which can’t quite be articulated. And that’s the mysterious and even spooky aspect of how our greatest stories seem to emerge—in the space between the characters, in the expansiveness of unwritten traits, in the inhabiting of perspective. It isn’t reducible and you can’t extract the experience in a simplified form—just as you can’t experience riding a bicycle from a description of riding a bicycle. Whatever comes next for the novel, we can be sure that sensibility, expansiveness, and perspective will be key. And that, for our most artful novels, for the novels that we reread, an honest description of the story will require every word.