I have been at work on a book off and on for two years, as I have previously posted. It's an historical novel, deeply researched, and three voices carry the plot.
Here is the lesson of a multiply voiced novel: Collisions are essential, and they should not look like coincidence. The collisions (between characters, within moments, across voices) must carry meaning. They must signify.
I work on the signifiers now. It is slow but fascinating going. I look to the masters to see how it is done—Louise Erdrich, William Faulkner, and now Jayne Anne Phillips in her new novel, Lark & Termite, which got her a starred PW review, for starters, but more than that, it has Tim O'Brien saying:
What a beautiful, beautiful novel this is—so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving. I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark and Termite is by far the best new novel I've read in the last five years or so.
I'd love to know of other masters of collision, of when you think multiply voiced novels work.
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Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Blog: Beth Kephart Books (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Michael Ondaatje, Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips, Fae Myenne-Ng, Kate Moses, Prague, Susan Straight, Add a tag
Jayne Anne Phillips has a brilliant new book due out this coming January. A brilliant book: Faulkneresque. Unblinking. Committed. Not a shred of fear. It's called Lark & Termite, and in a future post I'll be getting to that, but for now, as I sit curled over the galleys, as I sit here celebrating Jayne Anne's unsinkable talent, I remember my first days with this writer, I remember an essay I once wrote. Because she is a rare, living legend, a rare female living legend, I post parts of that earlier piece here today, to provide context for what I'll post next week.
I met Jayne Anne Phillips in a city of puppets, on a night of daggering rain. It was Prague, the summer of 1995. She was across a gilded reception room, near a table piled high with apples and cheese, and I remember watching how she moved through the writers who had assembled there—moved through them, touched a hand to them, but escaped them just in time. Her long crimped hair sat on her shoulders like a cape. She seemed unspoiled by the rain.
Standing there, observing Jayne Anne, I was struck by contradictions, as readers of her work have always been. Here was the woman who had yielded characters who marched straight out of the dark side and spoke: Jamaica, you black doll, wobbling like a dead girl sewn of old socks …. Here was the author of tender reminisce: My mother’s ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water. Here was the teacher with the reputation for being obsessed with the miniscule, the line edit, the word and its hyphen, the punctuation mark. Here was the mother both saddled with beauty—charcoal blue eyes, sun-darkened skin, a photogenic nose and chin—and famously uncomfortable with beauty’s dark allure.
It occurred to her, I never did ask why, to speak to me that night. When had I gotten to Prague? Where was I from? Had I gone to the castle across the bridge? Had I seen the big cathedral? This morning, I said. Pennsylvania, I said. And no, I’d seen neither castle nor cathedral, though I’d hoped to at one point, when there was time. She asked me to call her the following morning at ten. She said we’d go see things together.
We spent the next day jostled by the summer crowds of Prague, Jayne Anne and me, our families. We spent it beneath pinched-high roofs, beside confessionals, in the trapped light behind stained glass. Cathedral and castle. Gardens and walls. Heat, and the sound of singers singing. It was mid-afternoon before we made our way back, over the bridge. We bought postcards and jewelry and architectural miniatures, then parted ways in Mala Strana.
Over the next ten days I got to know Jayne Anne, quietly and slowly. If she was cautious in among the crowds, she was generous in private. If she was guarded about the price of fame, she spoke without pretension. She talked about stories, about words, about the book that she’d been writing. She talked about the carnival that is the writer’s life. She asked questions, too—what it was that made me write, where I thought I might be going, what I hoped to get from books, and over coffee and hot chocolate and one kind of cookie then the next I said that I was writing because I always had, because I couldn’t break the habit. I said I was writing because I believed that words could be morally persuasive.
In Prague I wasn’t a writer yet; I was just a woman, writing. I was just a woman with a writing dream, and Jayne Anne listened to it. After ten days went by, I left for home; after more time passed, I got a postcard. A portrait of a Ferris wheel on the banged-up front, and on the back, a single gesture: Dear Beth, it said, are you really gone? No. No. You’re still here with us.
Being out in the world now with books of my own, I am overwhelmed when I think back on Prague, Jayne Anne, and castles. I know the price of advice, I know the weight of strangers’ manuscripts, I know the urgency behind the questions: Read me? Know me? Teach me? Promote me? Love my book? Make me a writer? When you lean in the direction of another’s work, you lean precariously out of your own. When you attend to the dreams and works of others, you are thrown from the path you had been on. In Prague I was a stranger—unknown, prone, as I continue to be prone, to wrecking sentences with elaborate extensions. I was living on the other side of books—unpublished, unread, linguistically ungainly—and still, on a night of rain, in a city of puppets, Jayne Anne asked if I had seen a castle. She opened a door, and I walked through. I invaded her world with my own.
Like the architect, the writer is a romanticized profession. It is the lavish drunkness of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the outrageous cruelty of Sinclair Lewis, the staggering machismo of Ernest Hemingway, the infidelities, always that. We love the brokenhearted writer. We love the beg for forgiveness, the confession of betrayal, the fragile ego smashed wide apart in the finest final pages. Writing, the myth goes, is tenderness reserved for the book, intelligence transferred to fiction, generosity given over to scene, and the writing life is the life that’s lived subservient to stories. Thieves, writers are, and shadows drag behind them. And wherever writers claim to broker the truth, they cast, instead, a net of lies.
It is the irreproachable loneliness of the writer we’ve come to expect, the miserly way they parcel out their flecks of available love. Those who love too much get nowhere. Those who teach will never sell. Those who give back cannot be classified as genius. Those who cede the stage are thrust aside. Don’t expect a thing from a writer but their books. Don’t look for their decency anywhere but before you, on the page.
Except I cannot prove the myth. Except I have lived within the graces of its polar opposite. I have opened my mailbox to a postcard from Michael Ondaatje, a careful, intricate, telling response to a letter I had written. I have found a pen in my mailbox, too—a gift from a novelist I met only once, after standing in line for hours at a bookstore. A writer friend brought my son paper stars, and another writer sent me seeds, and a writer’s blueberries have arrived as well—overnighted to preserve their wild freshness. And one day an orchid appeared with two dozen purple blooms and, another day, a pillbox from Dubai and always books and, astonishingly, more seeds and three packages of saffron, and a jar of jam and a bundle of photographs, a pen, a chocolate bar, a ceramic dragonfly, a subscription to a magazine. Dear Beth, are you really gone? No. No. You’re still here with us.
It is from the gifts and notes of writers that I have learned what writing is. It is how writers have reached far beyond their books that has rescued me from absurd and brazen dreams and taught me what really matters. What I thought writing was writing isn’t. How I thought writers were at least some writers aren’t. Where I thought I’d take my rewards, I have found nothing worth my keeping. Where I expected little, I’ve been overcome with flavor. If I thought I could write myself into kindness with words, I have learned, from my writer friends to know the extent of the possible. If I thought I’d write my way to truth, I have been helped to redefine my purpose. Memory is not memoir. Truth supercedes the tale. Arfulness induces artifice. And writing a book is not publishing a book. And being a writer sometimes means that one does anything but writing. And.
Lost, often lost in the dispiriting mechanics of publishing, or the disappointments of the trade, or the injustice that can be done to an ambition or a story, I have found my anchor in other writers, in the gifts and cards and emails that have floated in, across the nether. Beth, we are writers by virtue of our stance to the world. Plus the act makes us feel good. Writing makes me like myself. One email, out of many. It is such a scary time, when your novel is tender and green and you feel if it is not tended it must just dry up and blow away. Another. Don’t want to be that famous anymore, so we’ve cured each other, you and me, maybe.
When I was a child aspiring to be a writer, I never dreamed about growing up and knowing other writers; I wasn’t that audacious. I thought about how putting words together made me feel. I thought about riding a train and seeing my book on a stranger’s lap. I thought about the view I’d have from my writing window, and the places I’d go to find story, and the books I’d have stacked around me like old friends. What I knew about writers I’d know from their books; that was the assumption I’d made. Writers wouldn’t have the time, just as I wouldn’t have the time, to talk about books and their making.
But now I am on the other side of books, and what has begun to matter most to me is those who make the writing right. I celebrate the wisdom of writers and what they know. I celebrate the life I live, in writerly company. I celebrate the notes that I wake up to, the attention, the succor, the decency, the humor, the honorable and companionable quality of the endless conversation. It isn’t finally about writing. It is finally about living. It is about reaching out and listening, imagining another.
I'm sure yours will be one!
You make such a great point about what is essential in this type of undertaking.
Happy Saturday.
The Waves, perhaps . . .
I think Jennifer Egan did a great job on linking, colliding her characters in Look At Me. It is the only book I have read recently that I could think of being written in multiple voices.
Can't wait to hear more about your book. :)
I finally looked on Amazon for Lark & Termite and realized the book isn't out until January! But, for some reason, my library system has one copy. Three people already have the book on hold! Now I can't wait to get the book.
You're right about the collisions being necessary in a multiple voiced novel. Good luck!
This is a really great post. I wrote earlier this fall about a novel that several people enjoyed but that bothered me because a few scenes where characters crossed paths was too coincidental. It wasn't multi-voiced but the scenes involved important characters. I got a lot of comments that coincidence in novels is to be expected and even allowed! I think the true masters (and yes, you are a master) understand that collisions should not look like coincidence.
(I'm wracking my brain for a multi-voiced novel that I read lately and feel as if a god one if hovering right out of reach. If I can think of it, I'll let you know)
Thank you, for your suggestions. Thank you, all. I am not at all sure that I am up to the task I seem to have given myself, but I work toward resolution.
Miss Em, I remember vividly that post. I remember siding with you.
What about these:
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Dancer by Colum McCann
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Grete — what wonderful suggestions. They all sit here; I love them all. The Hours would come closest to what I am doing, for my story is told by three who are brought together by one force but who don't, for example, live within the same house, who have their very distinct, singular stories to tell. Dancer is an unusual book, somewhat like Zoli, and I think of it as more of a collage than, perhaps, The Hours. History of Love is a good suggestion. I struggled with some aspects of that book (Krauss's thematic similarities to her husband's work, for example)but thought the language beautiful. It's a book I'm going to go snatch off the shelf right now.
Thank you all for thinking out loud with me about this!
Oh, Faulkner. He's been in my head ever since The Sound and the Fury.
I think Justine Larbalestier did quite a smart job with the multiple voices in her Magic or Madness trilogy.
P.S. Make Lemonade - I didn't expect to like it, just because I'm not usually drawn to books with that sort of subject matter. But I did. I especially liked how quietly it built to those "grace note" passages.
And I read it after a unit in sociology on urban inequality and poverty in the U.S., while riding the El through Chicago. I passed buildings where I could picture LaVaughn living or Jolly working. It was perfect!