Hello and Happy New Year
I went back recently to read a piece I wrote a little while ago because I wanted to use some elements of its structure in something I am working on currently. The piece was this essay on gossip, which is one of my favourite things I have written. I wrote it when I was 27, which now seems very young to me.
It was nice to read this again with distance. In hindsight I think the writing is brilliant. It can sound self aggrandising to talk about yourself this way, but if you’re serious about what you do and great at what you do I don’t see the point in pretending you aren’t.
The moral argument of the piece is sophisticated and original. The sentence level writing is distinctive but restrained at the same time, with a tone which is sort of mischievous and the opposite of melodramatic, but also not flat. But the structure is most interesting to me.
In that essay I link different and unrelated time frames together smoothly, in a way that allows time to expand and contract without you really noticing. So you go into one anecdote about gossip, and time expands over that person’s history and story, and then it contracts again when the narrator (me) leaves the anecdote and moves to someone else, when it expands again. You don’t really feel this happening, and there aren’t lots of signposts to it (phrases saying “later this happened” or “then I was doing x”, etc). I was rereading it to see how the joining up of these time frames worked in that essay.
Trying to render time in a smooth way that feels realistic, or at least isn’t overtly signposted, is something I am interested in doing in the fiction I write because it relates to the thing I am most interested in doing in fiction, which is to render the experience of a consciousness. I thought I would write a little about that here because it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.
I remember when I first read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, I was about 18. I found the experience so exhilarating. Then I went off and read lots of his other work, and then, over the years, I reread and reread it. I can never get back to that first time because now when I read his work I think too much about the mechanics of it. But I still remember the experience of reading him for the first time clearly because I felt he managed to get a consciousness down on the page exactly.
Over the years I have come to realise that the fiction I find interesting is concerned with the question of how to represent the passage of time and with representing certain properties of consciousness, if not to the extent that Faulkner was (properties like memory, the formation of thought, speech, and self denial). And so, in the fiction I find interesting I can tell the writer has asked themselves questions like: How can I best represent a character thinking? And then come up with their own answer to this.
To my mind this is the difference between what the novel can do as a form and the personal essay. In a personal essay you relay your experiences but you don’t try to represent your consciousness. It is accepted that you are telling the reader a story, and so the question of narrative positioning is already answered. You write as you would in a letter and represent thought and speech as you would in a letter.
In a good personal essay the writer will address the idea that their memory and impression of events is fallible, but they will do so explicitly. (They might say: “I remember X this way, but I was 13 and a lot of time has passed since”). Whereas in the kind of fiction where the writer has tried to represent how memory works you will hopefully come away with the impression of fallibility, without this having been spelled out to you.
I know there is a school of thought that would say none of this is interesting and the point of a novel is just to get information down in an entertaining and clear, readable style but I just don’t agree at all and I don’t like reading that kind of work. I find it boring. (Do essays ever fall slightly outside this? Yes, I think so actually. A question for another time perhaps.)
Eugene Marten is, to my mind, one of the most exciting living fiction writers (to caveat: of those I have read) in terms of the work he has done and is doing to represent speech, thought and memory and I am interested in the fact that he does this in close third person, rather than first person. I think his latest book Pure Life represented a leap forward in his work in terms of expanding and contracting passages of time too.
I used to hate third person narration in novels because I felt it was essentially always driving a novel to be personal essay-like in nature (“he said x, she felt y’) rather than giving you the sense of how he or she would speak or feel. (Now I notice first person novels can be increasingly like this, basically akin to personal essays.) But I remember when I first read James Baldwin, that was the first time I saw someone who had managed to use third person in a way that still made his characters feel alive. I think this is the strength of Paul Murray’s work too, as well as Natalia Ginzburg’s, László Krasznahorkai’s, Toni Morrison’s and Sally Rooney’s.
I felt a little disappointed that Rooney’s latest book had sections in letter form, because I felt her brilliant talent for giving the sense of how people think and speak was necessarily hampered. But then the more distance I got from that book the more I thought that the point of the letters was to emphasise how stunted these characters had become, from each other’s perspective, with distance.
I thought Jeremy Cooper’s Bolt From the Blue used letters brilliantly in this way too. That book is so great, I don’t think it really got its dues at all. There are letters between a mother and daughter (which I hated the sound of) but he uses the stunted, artificial nature of this form to create the sense of a stunted, superficial relationship which then itself feels very real. It’s a real work of genius I think.
I really admire the work Anna Burns, Eimer McBride and Rebecca Watson have done fairly recently to represent the chaotic nature of thought and speech and how they intersect. And the work Gwendoline Riley and Olga Tokarczuk have done in terms of portraying speech and self denial. They both managed to make narrators who feel extremely trustworthy and then, in flashes, completely unhinged. This made me think a lot about how we perceive ourselves, and the extent to which we can be aware that we are acting bizarrely. Lucie Elven also has this talent for creating characters who seem, totally believably, to have a distance from themselves, the way a lot of people do. I’m not sure you could do that in a personal essay.
Memory is something that Nicole Flattery and Mary Gaitskell both represent in interesting ways. I have also wondered if the slightly surreal quality of Flattery’s writing almost makes fun of the idea of representing consciousness, the idea that you could see another person’s view of the world. In that way it reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s work. Maya Binyam’s book Hangman has a similar quality, to my mind. As does César Aira’s work.
When I started reading Tom Drury earlier this year I had the same sense too. I have always hated that convention in some novels where, when you meet a character, you are given two paragraphs of back story on them (“X was born in North London, her mother was a nurse…”). It feels fake and silly to me. That isn’t how you find out information about people you meet in your life, or the type of information you find out.
Drury has this technique of giving a few paragraphs of kind of ridiculous “small town rumour mill” backstory about each character (“he was known to have survived two separate lightning strikes, he kept a collection of ornamental spoons” type stuff). To me this felt like a subtle send up of that technique, but also a way of imparting information which felt closer to that which you may be told about someone you are about to meet. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be this, but that is how I read it, and I thought it was genius.
This Substack wasn’t really supposed to be a list of books I like or have liked recently, and it is not that, it is by no means extensive. I just thought it may be interesting to write about books more in terms of how I read them, which is how I think a lot of people probably read them.
I find it a little strange how much discourse and criticism of books is around plot and themes, or grouping together books depending on the identity of the author. I don’t read novels for those qualities at all, but to see how writers approach the problem of representing time and the properties of consciousness. And, as a young woman who has recently published a novel, it hasn’t escaped my notice that an even more common strand of discourse can be more like: So which bits are based on you, eh?
When I am asked this kind of thing it makes me feel like I am an alien who has arrived on earth looking exactly like a human baby. And I am unable to speak English so I can’t explain to anyone that I’m not really a human baby; I am an alien. And people are leering and grinning, speaking in baby noises and I can’t explain that I have a whole different planet I’d prefer to talk about instead.
Except I don’t come from a different planet. And I don’t believe the average person doesn’t find questions about how to put a consciousness down on the page interesting (and more interesting than random biographical information about a stranger) because this relates to the question of what a consciousness is. Which is close to the question of what it means to be alive, and what that feels like, and I just don’t believe that most people don’t spend at least some of their time thinking about this.
That’s one thing I really hate about our culture, is how stupid it pretends everyone is, or assumes everyone to be. The assumption that the average person only wants to talk about being an influencer or celebrity age gap relationships and never thinks about anything deeper than this. I just don’t believe people are like this, or I haven’t experienced them to be.
Till next time xxxx
I miss the flowers, here is wilderness instead