More on Parkhurst

Now that I’m just the teeniest bit beginning to imagine/believe that I myself might write a novel, I’m starting to pay attention to what I read in a different way. I always envied the way writers read books. They don’t read like I do, to follow a plot, to learn about a locale or a time period, to get know characters. Or maybe they do that, but in addition, they’re looking at how the book is put together. They’re noticing how the author did things, and thinking about why the author might have made a particular choice, and they’re evaluating whether they like it or not, whether they would have made a similar choice. Writer/readers are studying things that I haven’t even begun to understand or know the terms for: point of view maybe, or… well I just don’t even know. I just know I can’t do that.

But I’m starting to try to learn and to teach myself, at least I hope I am. Here’s a simple thing I’ve noticed: how much logistical information the writer provides on what a character is doing – he parked the car, he got out of the car, he walked slowly to the hospital doors… I’m making that up, but it’s a question of how you get a character from here to there and how much of that info the reader needs, right? Parkhurst seems to think we need a lot of it, at least more than Ann Patchett thinks we need. IN the early parts of The Dogs of Babel, the reader gets quite a lot of information about how characters get from here to there, more than I really care to read. But then she starts to cut back a bit, like here on page 80: “Lexy took the phone book down from the top of the refrigerator, and she looked up veterinarians. When she brought her back home from the vet…” It goes on from there to discuss what the vet told Lexy, but we the reader didn’t have to actually get in the car and go to the vet with Lexy – what a relief!

However, the author is very stingy with other information, like anything about the two main characters in this book – how old are they, how long have they been married. You learn early on that Paul is 39 and Lexy is younger, but how much younger we don’t know until p. 187 when we finally learn that she’s eight years younger than he is. You also know that they got married when Paul was 39, but you don’t know how long they’ve been married for a while – it could be 2 years or twenty. On page 108, Paul, who is narrating this book (in his straightforward boring professorial voice – oh, but I guess that’s another thing a writer would evaluate in this book –is he a reliable narrator?) says he is 43, so now we know – 4 years of marriage. A relatively new relationship. Especially hard to lose a spouse so young and after such a short marriage.
(posted 9/29 – written 6/23)