Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Her writers group loathed her narrator
Plans for Experiment
Jennifer Egan had just finished A Visit from the Goon Squad, a fragmentary book with much of its action offstage, and she had been rewarded for it. Starting Manhattan Beach, she took that as a cue to be experimental again and planned tricky narrative strategies so it wouldn't be plain historical fiction.
The Narrator Problem
The story pushed back. A shipwreck, a gangland murder, and survival at sea left irony and fragmentation with nothing to offer, so she gave up the tricks quickly. What lasted longer was a narrator whose asides called attention to the artificiality of telling a story set in the past. Her writers group, who hear every draft read aloud, loathed it. It made them angry, because it felt like being talked down to, as if the writer expected readers to fall into a fugue state and forget it was the twenty-first century.
Letting Go
She spent a stretch angry and hopeless, then gave up all of the asides. Getting rid of the thing she had tried so hard to save felt like relief, and she often finds that a good aesthetic choice feels exactly that way. After a book that went one direction, she likes to work against what she just did.
Where do self-aware narrators come from?
Narrators who step out of a story to comment on how it is being told have a long history. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, published in installments from 1759 to 1767, is made almost entirely of such digressions. John Fowles's 1969 novel The French Lieutenant's Woman has a narrator who describes the 1860s from the twentieth century and admits he is inventing his characters. Writers like Fowles were part of a postmodern wave in the 1960s and 1970s that made this voice a recognized technique.
Where does cutting your darlings come from?
The advice is usually traced to Arthur Quiller-Couch, a Cambridge professor, who told students in lectures around 1914 to murder their darlings. It often gets credited to William Faulkner or Stephen King, both of whom repeated versions of it. Quiller-Couch meant passages a writer is proud of for their own cleverness. The lectures were published in 1916 as On the Art of Writing.
How is Goon Squad built so differently?
A Visit from the Goon Squad is made of linked chapters, each with its own narrator and style, that jump between decades and between characters connected to the music business. One chapter is told entirely as slides from a PowerPoint presentation. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for 2010.
More from Better in Person with Stephen Dubner
