Exile on Ninth Street

I’m about 18 pages from finishing my read of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and I thought I would take a break to share some notes I took yesterday when reading.

As intriguing as the gender switch is, another aspect I find fascinating is the form the novel takes — a fictional biography, unusual in its presentation.

Novels, especially in the 19th century, took the form of a biography, focusing specifically on one character and his or her interactions with society and history, and tended to focus on the character as he or she responded to a particular situation; thus the story followed, a narrative developed.

But Orlando’s shifts through gender and time breaks the narrative. Orlando seems to passively accept this movement. The biography’s narrative seems almost all situation, all part of the “halo of perception” Woolf prescribed for modernist fiction.

“Orlando lives through everything without really living through anything,” Jane Smiley writes in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. “Woolf is after meaning rather than events, showing that events and their meaning do not necessarily coincide, and important actors in events do not necessarily understand them as well as peripheral witnesses do.”

The way Woolf presents the novel, though, demonstrates why novels are such a versatile form. They absorb almost every literary form — biography, autobiography, essay, even drama and poetry — whatever the writer needs to present her perception. I think its a great form for readers, simply because it encompasses such a diverse spectrum.

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Editor’s Note: This post has been written as part of Sunday Salon.

The Time Traveler’s Wife (MacAdam/Cage 2003) explores an unusual relationship, that of Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire. Like many love stories, the novel develops the relationship from courtship to marriage, but, adds a twist. A genetic disorder causes Henry to time travel, thus interrupting the ordinary patterns of his and Clare’s life — the couple first meets when Clare is six, and Henry, as an adult, has traveled back thirty years — and challenging notions of free will (Henry is unable to change events, and the couple seems almost fated to develop their romance). The novel also diverges from some love stories, exchanging sappiness for a realistic, though sometimes dark, portrait of a relationship.

I invited the book’s author, Audrey Niffenegger, to discuss the novel, her current projects, and her recent reading.

Below is the interview:

You’ve mentioned that The Time Traveler’s Wife originated with the title. How did the story evolve from there?

I wrote the ending, then the scene in which Clare loses her virginity, then a prologue which I later ditched,

Audrey Niffenegger (Photo by Christopher Schneberger)

then I stopped and tried to think how to structure the thing. I made a sort of list of scenes, organized them into three acts, and then started randomly working them until there was enough to see what it might be. The manuscript leant itself to being repeatedly restructured.

How did you manage the novel’s structure?

Originally it was thematically organized, but early readers found that confusing. Several people suggested following Clare’s chronology, which is mostly what I ended up doing. The story itself is very simple: courtship, marriage, Henry’s death, Clare’s life after that. It seems complicated because it is told out of order.

Present tense seems perfect for this novel. To me the choice of present tense seems to indicate that every action is in the here and now or suspends time. Which certainly seems true for Henry. Why did you decide to use present tense?

I couldn’t figure out when the present was; there was no baseline, no now, no past. By putting it in present tense the reader experiences what the characters experience, so that resolved all sorts of problems.

Read more…

Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love is a novel that should star Kevin Spacey in its movie version (a Google search just revealed the book was made into a movie last year; Kevin Spacey wasn’t in it). Or at least the subdued Bradley W. Smith, whose narrative voice is central to a multi-voiced meditation on love, would ideally be cast as Spacey in a movie version of the book.

Spacey tends to play the middle class lonesome loser who sort of redeems himself, or gains something by the end of the film. Like those many Spacey characters — I’m thinking specifically of American Beauty, without all the darkness of that comedy — Bradley is the lonesome loser type, a manager of a mall coffee shop, who loses two wives, but in the end gains, at least for a brief moment, the love he’s searching for.

Using multiple narratives, Baxter plays a metafictional game, opening the novel with the novelist Charlie Baxter trying to write a novel: the novelist then goes about interviewing the characters, and the characters then go on telling the story with multiple voices. Baxter masters the multiple narrative, without losing the reader.

Bradley’s narrative is central to this novel: the coffee shop he manages — Jitters — draws in several of the other characters: Esther and Harry Ginsberg (though they also happen to be Bradley’s neighbors), Diana, and Chloe and Oscar, all of whom, in turn, relate their own love stories. Bradley’s love life is also a narrative hub around which the other narrators circle, from which they then branch out on their own narrative spokes, sometimes relating their own stories, sometimes commenting on the lives of others.

Bradley’s love-lost-love-gained narrative also generates the thematic arc of the other characters, the most interesting of which is the love-lost-love-gained story of Chloe and Oscar, a young punk-rock couple with, oddly, middle-class aspirations. Both abandoned by their families, they pursue a tragicomic, vaguely Romeo-Juliet love story, Oscar’s father Mac Metzger — the Bat — serving as both Montague and Capulet, forbidding, yet never stopping, the couple’s love. Their story serves the theme, deepening its meaning. Unlike Bradley, Chloe never loses at love; it’s never brief, even when it’s threatened by the sinister-yet-ridiculous figure of the Bat.

Even the appearance of loss — Oscar’s death — doesn’t deter Chloe or her love. She works through her grief, encouraged by love, by her belief that somehow Oscar will return to her.

“Once someone has bound your heart,” she says, “he’s the only person who can let it loose again. I’m waiting, Charlie (the novelist). I’m patient. I don’t ever want my heart unchained, except by him.”