Breaking a literary taboo

This week at the Colgate Writers' Conference (and for those of you who missed the comments of the conference post, I highly recommend this smart, friendly, incredibly fun event), I had a student who had written a very long, complicated novel spanning many years, and incorporating many points of view. And the student broke a major literary taboo: that is, the novel featured a hugely important piece of secret knowledge on which the whole story hinged--and also featured a close third-person narrative from the point of view of the only character who held this piece of knowledge. And yet this character just happened never to think about the vital information.

Generally speaking, I consider this a terrible cheat. It's a fairly common tactic in lousy police procedurals, where the detective's point of view is casually intercut with scenes from the mind of the killer--whose identity and location coincidentally never cross his mind.

Why does this bother me so much? It's a violation of what I consider to be the prime directive of literary narrative: the exploration of consciousness. I'll accept all manner of plot implausibilities, but when a writer makes people think in an impossible way, I become very, very impatient. If you can't trust the narrator to give you an accurate representation of the characters' minds, you can't trust the book at all.

And yet sometimes writers kind of almost get away with it. I just read The Girl Who Played With Fire, the pretty good sequel to Steig Larsson's terrific The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (I'm not going to review it here, but I can tell you the ending, while exciting, is embarrasingly implausible), and I saw this taboo broken many, many times. A character is suspected of committing three murders. Did she do it? We get 75 pages from her point of view before she happens to think about it. In this case, it nearly works--the character in question has a highly unusual, compartmentalized mind, and you can almost make a case for her not considering her own possible role in the murders over several weeks. Ultimately, though, it's a lame trick, and cheapens the book.

Karin Fossum, on the other hand, pulls it off in The Indian Bride, a superior and highly unusual crime novel; our killer is hidden in plain sight, and from himself, in a very effective literary sleight-of-hand. But it works because it makes sense for the character to think this way. It's never just for Fossum's convenience.

Of course, you can do this easily in the first person--first person narrations are inherently untrustworthy, and sometimes a writer foregrounds this quality, as in Kazuo Ishiguro's great unreliable-narrator novels. But the third-person narrator is supposed to be somebody you trust--somebody who understands the characters entirely, and doesn't let them get away with anything. It's a rule made to be broken, but break it at your own risk.

Two specimens of awesomeness

I was impressed by two things this week, one a novel, the other a poem. The novel is the late Stieg Larsson's thriller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. This book is a bestseller and hardly needs my recommendation, but it is a superb example of the genre, and kept me distracted from everything else in my life for a couple of knuckle-biting days. Larsson was a Swedish journalist who died in 2004 at the age of 50; he left behind this novel and two sequels, complete but unpublished. That Wikipedia page also calls Larsson a photographer, and I'm not surprised to learn this. Cameras play a role in this book, and the protagonist knows a little too much about them. He can identify a Hasselblad, for instance, at 200 yards.

The protagonist in question is a middle-aged financial reporter named Mikael Blomkvist, who stumbles into a murder mystery wrapped in a family conundrum rolled into a financial puzzle; his co-protagonist is a 25-year-old borderline-autistic punk girl named Lisbeth Salander (the girl in the title), an emotionally disturbed ward of the state, hacker extraordinaire, and crack private investigator. I know--it sounds hopelessly corny, doesn't it? It really isn't, in spite of the occasional (and necessary) run of expository dialogue. Indeed, the book flirts with literariness now and then--not too much, luckily. The point of reading it is the absorbing plot and the wonderful Lisabeth, who is, in spite of her outre, overdetermined persona, a truly original creation, even within the very impressive Scandanavian crime scene. A wonderful book.

The poem is by Frederick Seidel, and is in this week's New Yorker. It is called "Poem By The Bridge At Ten-Shin," is quite long, and is just extraordinary. I am a real sucker for the way Seidel lurches from erudition to crassness, from the lyric to the nursery rhyme, from the wise to the puerile, often inside the same line; here, he seems to achieve some outrageous apotheosis of self, with line after line of mad juxtaposition and loopy rhyme. The poem is rude and childish and brilliant; please give it a look. Here's the ending:

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned
Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.
The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound
That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.
The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.
They're watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.
The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.
The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that's missing.

Jesus Christ. Those last four lines, with their catatonic rhyme scheme and cracked-up rhythm, somehow just scare the shit out of me. Happy Halloween.