Untitled Books

"The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction," Percy Lubbock wrote in 1921, "I take to be governed by the question of point of view." The ensuing ninety years have not been especially kind to many of Lubbock's dicta about novel-writing, but that one still comes pretty close to the mark. For novice writers, point of view often seems like a technical matter whose range is so limited as to be almost binary ("this story isn't really working well in the third person," I hear my students advise each other; "have you tried it in the first?). But a lifetime of reading shows the question to be one of intimidating elasticity; in fact, you could do worse than to use point of view (or POV, as I hope you'll permit me to abbreviate it from here on) as a prism through which to view the whole history of the novel, from the magnificently arrogant third-person omniscience of Balzac or Dickens to the epic interiority of Joyce or the strict, programmatically humble subjectivity of the nouveau roman. POV is the formal measure of the writer's relationship to both audience and invention, a kind of literary/philosophical barometer that calibrates questions of humanism, doubt and even the writer's relationship with - or similarity to - God.

But what pleases me most, as a writer for whom reading novels is always a bit of a busman's holiday, is the one-off, the approach to point of view that's so idiosyncratic as to be essentially unrepeatable, its success relevant only to itself.  When I sat down to write The Privileges, I knew I wanted to begin with a wedding scene, in part because it just seemed nicely perverse to me to open with a wedding instead of, as so many traditional novels do, closing with one. Still, everybody's read a lot of wedding scenes: how to find some fresh way to do justice to the particular, stylized madness of it? After lots of flailing I hit upon a technique that involved breaking some fundamental POV rules - essentially, changing POV from paragraph to paragraph, or sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without the crutch of space breaks. In the whirl of perspectives, some of which crop up only for one sentence and then never return, there is a long stretch where the bride's and groom's POVs are buried, which seemed to me true to their experience, as the ritual takes over and they become, temporarily, less themselves than the centerpieces of the ceremony. I remember figuring out that what was required in order to keep everything straight in the reader's mind was less a matter of clarity of language than of an absolute fidelity to time: that is, in the course of the scene the camera, so to speak, may shift, but the clock may never stop running. It was a type of storytelling I couldn't keep coherent any longer than the term of that opening scene itself, but it was fun while it lasted, and it still seems to me a decent correlative for the disorienting madness of a wedding day.

I have no trouble at all recalling the pleasure other such POV experiments have given me as a reader. They are too original to have influenced me in any sense other than that of their general formal daring. Here are a few of them:

The old flamethrower still hasn't gotten his due, as far as I'm concerned. Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy is, if you please, a first-person POV novel in which the words "I," "me," and even "we" never appear once. It takes a while to catch on to the fact that that first-person narrator - the cuckolded husband of a woman having an affair - exists on the page at all, is not simply an authorial camera but a pair of eyes in the head of an agonized human being. What makes this not just technically impressive but legitimately great is that the form enhances perfectly the psychological drama of the narrative: this nameless man watches, watches, watches his wife and her lover, parsing every moment for material proof of what he knows to be true anyway, while to them, even when he is present it is very much as if he's not there at all.

From a purely technical perspective, Libra is Don DeLillo's best book by far, which is saying a lot. Twenty-nine separate points of view, by my count, but the real beauty of it is that one of them - that of Lee Harvey Oswald - becomes effectively powerless against the amassed force of the rest of them. It's all in the familiar close-third-person style, but every once in a while you will run into a sentence in which that third-person becomes so close it actually breaks through the pane and starts using first-person pronouns: "[Jack Ruby] had the ability to share an apartment with a roommate and just barge and rush around as if the guy wasn't there . . . Not that he didn't like having George around. It's a matter of once you're used to a human presence, growing up like I did with seven brothers and sisters plus two dead in infancy, you feel there's something missing in a household." About three-quarters of the way through the book there is a half-page passage narrated from the perspective of a CIA agent's very young daughter, as she lies awake in bed; that perspective has never been utilized before in the novel (as it has zero to do with the intricate plot) and it never comes back again. Just to have thought of it! Just to have had the courage to leave it in!

The Postman Always Rings Twice byJames M. Cain is one of the unsung American masterpieces. What it has to say about point of view comes on its very last page, as the past tense turns to present and the narrator waits for his appointment with the electric chair, for a murder he didn't commit: "There's a guy in No. 7 that murdered his brother, and says he didn't do it, his subconscious did it. I asked him what that meant, and he says you got two selves, one that you know about and the other that you don't know about, because it's subconscious. It shook me up. Did I really do it, and not know it? God Almighty, I can't believe that! I didn't do it! To hell with the subconscious. I don't believe it. It's just a lot of hooey, that this guy thought up so he could fool the judge." Read that last sentence a few times.  Every time I catch myself descending too objectively, too explanatorily, into the psychology of my own characters, I think of Cain and then I start deleting. It's okay to see your own characters more clearly than they seem themselves, of course, but when you give that knowledge too much room on the page, what you're really doing is lowering the bar for yourself as a storyteller.

In No One Writes To The Colonel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez specializes in long, Joycean sentences in the course of which POV will sometimes be handed over to a new character before the sentence is even finished. Of course, this is a kind of stepchild of:

Mrs. Dalloway.   Virginia Woolf passes the POV from character to character on no other pretext than their walking past each other in the street. Woolf is one of the great interrogators of received technique. To the Lighthouse is on the short list of novels every writer should have to re-read at a minimum of once every five years in order to have his or her license renewed. Along with:

The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford. There are few phrases, in the context of a classroom or of a work of literary criticism, whose essential laziness makes me angrier than the catch-all "unreliable narrator." The trick of conveying to the reader, in a first-person fiction, information that the narrator him or herself is not aware of conveying is art of the highest and most difficult order. You could make the case that every such novel is in some sense derived from Cervantes or Sterne, which is fair enough: but to me, every writer who has published a so-called unreliable-narrator novel in the last century should be paying royalties to Ford's estate. In terms of pure technique this is the greatest first-person novel ever written, in which a well-mannered, feckless cuckold (another one!) tries his best to make not just social but human sense of the treachery all around him and finally, tragically, by sifting through the same memories over and over again, gets it.