How Novels Work

How Novels Work

John Mullan

Language: English

Pages: 368

ISBN: 0199281785

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Drawing on his weekly Guardian column, "Elements of Fiction," John Mullan offers an engaging look at the novel, focusing mostly on works of the last ten years as he illuminates the rich resources of novelistic technique.

Mullan sheds light on some of the true masterworks of contemporary fiction, including Monica Ali's Brick Lane, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Don DeLillo's Underworld, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley under Ground, Ian McEwan's Atonement, John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, Philip Roth's The Human Stain, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, and Zadie Smith's White Teeth. He highlights how these acclaimed authors use some of the basic elements of fiction. Some topics (like plot, dialogue, or location) will appear familiar to most novel readers, while others (meta-narrative, prolepsis, amplification) will open readers' eyes to new ways of understanding and appreciating the writer's craft. Mullan also excels at comparing modern and classic authors--Nick Hornby's adoption of a female narrator is compared to Daniel Defoe's; Ian McEwan's use of weather is set against Austen's and Hardy's.
How Novels Work explains how the pleasures of novel reading often come from the formal ingenuity of the novelist, making visible techniques and effects we are often only half-aware of as we read. It is an entertaining and stimulating volume that will captivate anyone who is interested in the contemporary or the classical novel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ward, as if the experiences were not enough. McEwan’s device is time-honoured. Cecilia Tallis, Briony’s elder sister, is whiling away the hot summer after leaving university by reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Robbie keeps asking her how she is getting on with it. Richardson’s novel too tells the very story of its own existence: you find out at its conclusion that the ‘letters’ between the main characters that comprise the book are Clarissa’s ‘legacy’ after her death. The heroine commands in

beyond Cologne, explaining why, in the novel, there are ‘more details on this first stretch of the line than I had the confidence to include later’.3 Some of the Vintage paperback editions of Greene’s novels currently available include the novelist’s own introductions; others substitute introductions written by celebrity writers (Zadie Smith, Paul Theroux). Authorial prefaces have, however, largely died out, perhaps simply because the modern apparatus of publicity provides the author with many

his force into ‘the niyyah—the making of the intention’ rather than the punishment (181). The last of these belongs with the many words imported into Monica Ali’s narrative that speak of special cultural or religious practices. Nazneen thinks that the imams must have compassion for women because they allow them, when pregnant, to ‘do namaz’ from a chair (234). Her prayers are disrupted when she drops her ‘tasbee’ under a radiator (130). Her lover, Karim, is ‘taqwa’ (255). ‘More God-conscious than

love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women’ (28). Clarissa muses on her long-ago lesbian flirtation (one kiss) with Sally Seton, but as she does so the parenthesis lets us see her as the elegant, respectable lady of the house. The unspoken and the ordinary, what is thought and what is done, are simultaneous. Here is Peter Walsh, who is just leaving Regent’s Park and recalling his love for Clarissa: ‘A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again), but now,

end, this disgrace will even permit him a kind of humiliated self-recognition. A complaint is made against him for his sexual pursuit of his young student Melanie Isaacs, and an official investigation begins. Lurie is given the opportunity by his university to save his job by displaying a token penitence. Angered by the self-righteousness of those who sit in judgement on him and the dishonesty required of him, he refuses. He will not ‘express contrition’ (54) in some insincere public gesture of

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