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A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 | A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers
As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one path through fiction we’re most likely to travel― one we’re actually told to follow―and that’s the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?"
W. G. Sebald’s Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc—or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her “museum of specimens” include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.
Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let’s leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 2, 2019 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781948226141
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781948226141
- File size: 2068 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 1, 2019
A novelist tries her hand at literary theory.Venturing into the world of narrative theory, Alison (Creative Writing/Univ. of Virginia; Nine Island, 2016, etc.) takes a personal and idiosyncratic approach. As with many books on the subject, she begins with Aristotle and his famous beginning/middle/end arc of causality. But Alison grew "restless with the arc and plot," and W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants "was the first book to show me a way beyond the causal arc to create powerful forward motion in narrative" with patterns. Since then, she has sought "narratives that hint at structures inside them other than an arc, structures that create an inner sensation of traveling toward something and leave a sense of shape behind." These structures in texts "coincide with fundamental patterns in nature." Alison calls them waves, wavelets, spirals, networks, cells, and fractals. After her lengthy theoretical introduction, she explores the ways that writers have used these structural patterns in more than 20 diverse short stories, novellas, and novels: her "museum of specimens." Readers should perk up as Alison "dissect[s]" these texts, demonstrating how "we travel not just through places conjured in the story, but through the narrative itself." Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine "meanders in the shape of an elevator." Its "digressions "mean to get us to pause and look around." Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy is like a "Doppler radar screen, the bar scanning around and around." Alison devotes an entire chapter to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which is "deeply designed and patterned, with repeating shapes, webs of connection, visual images and phrases that repeat like dots of color on a canvas." Others coming under Alison's scrutiny include Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Carver, Stuart Dybek, Clarice Lispector, Anne Carson, Vikram Chandra, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tobias Wolff.For readers interested in literary theory, Alison does a great job making it palatable; for casual readers, it may be too much.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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