The novel takes place in Athens, where the newly divorced narrator is teaching a creative writing class. Despite the unique conceit, the narrative that unfolds is fairly traditional in structure, providing a clear thread for the reader to follow through the unconventional form. You can read the book straight through, but it is fun to refer to the poem and various references as you go, as if you really have picked up this book and are surprised by what’s inside. Pale Fire takes the form of a 999-line poem and its commentary-including a forward, annotations, and index, written by the poet’s neighbor, a fellow academic that seems increasingly unhinged. A feeling of cohesiveness is created not just by unity of theme and style, but also by a fifth chapter that brings many of the women together at the after-party of a play created by the book’s first character. The novel is written in a poetry/prose form, featuring long lines and little end punctuation. Divided into five sections and an epilogue, the first four sections each include three chapters focusing on three different women whose lives are intertwined or connected in some way, often loosely.
One of the unifying themes for this novel is identity, as (almost) all of the 12 main characters are Black, British women. I’m not interested in the patterns so scrutinized by statistics that everyone celebrates with a familiar, satisfied smile on their faces.” Shapes that don’t heed symmetry, that grow exponentially, brim over, bud, or on the contrary, that scale back to the single unit. Anything that deviates from the norm, that is too small or too big, overgrown or incomplete, monstrous and disgusting. What was supposed to develop but for some reason didn’t or vice versa, what outstretched the design. I’m interested in whatever shape this may take, mistakes in the making of the thing, dead ends. “My set of symptoms revolves around my being drawn to all things spoiled, flawed, defective, broken. Consider this paragraph about the narrator’s interest in strange curiosities: The novel’s themes are intricately connected to its structure, and the narrator often talks about both at the same time. Though also fragmentary in form, the book has a distinctly different vibe than the novels above, in part because the fragments are much longer chapters (ranging from a half page to dozens of pages), and in part because this feels even less linear and more like a network of ideas. This cerebral novel about travel, movement, and liminal spaces features vignettes, prose-poemy meditations, and essay-like explorations. Because one of the mothers has recently died, one daughter takes over her mother’s sections, and it’s her narrative that ultimately frames the book. The first section tells the stories of four Chinese immigrant mothers, the next of their American daughters, then the mothers again, then the daughters. The novel’s four sections are divided into four chapters (each with a different first-person narrator). You could argue that The Joy Luck Club is really linked stories, as almost every beautifully crafted chapter can stand alone (and often does in short story anthologies), but the book features an overarching narrative and a clear organizational structure, which is helpfully laid out in the table of contents. Most of the novel takes place over the course of a single night, which helps contain it, and the ending features a climax that brings everyone together in a shared purpose. The book reads a little like a stage play, a technique that makes it very clear who is speaking at every moment-essential when there are over 150 narrators. But most of the novel is told in the first-person voices of ghosts who complain and reminisce. Early chapters feature “found nonfiction,” that is, historical works spliced together, to set the scene for Willie’s death. Here are ten novels that used their unconventional structures to brilliant effect.Ī devastating novel about grief which revolves around the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie shouldn’t be this hilarious, but it is set in a graveyard of chatty ghosts. You can create your own specifications to your advantage, but the story must still be deliverable-that is, comprehensible to the reader. What I learned is this: A novel is not airline luggage, there are no strict rules, no arbitrary size and weight regulations that you must contemptuously squeeze your story into.