The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst (and then I'm moving on!)

I spent a lot of time in my last post writing about what I found on the back cover of The Nobodies Album, which led me into a conversation about book reviews and blurbs. I haven’t said much about my experience of reading The Nobodies Album, except to mention that it didn’t really grab me, and I found the mystery aspect of it to be pretty thin.

Another thing that bothered me in this book and bothers me in general when authors do it is the deliberate withholding of some key piece of information. I find that this technique can so often be manipulative and doesn’t really contribute to the narrative power of the book.

Here’s what I mean. In this book, Parkhurst tells the reader bit by bit that Octavia, the novelist who is the central character, is widowed and has lost a daughter, but the author doesn’t tell us how she lost these important people in her life until almost the end of the book. It is alluded to over and over, but by the time the actual catastrophic event is finally revealed, I have almost lost interest. At this point, I thought “ok, that’s sad, tragic even, but was it worth all that long drawn-out suspense?” I believe that I would have had more sympathy for the characters and a better understanding of the relationship between the remaining mother and son if I had known how they lost their husband/father and daughter/sister earlier in the novel.

The biggest example I can think of with this sort of thing is in The Kite Runner. It drove me crazy how the narrator repeatedly alluded to the terrible, life-changing event that had occurred years ago, but doesn’t let us know what it was until well into the book. Now that event, when it was finally revealed to the reader, was actually a stunning, shocking, and extremely dramatic event. But did I really have to wait so long and have it referred to in such a heavy-handed way so many times? Isn’t this just an artificial way of building suspense that wouldn’t be needed by a more skilled writer (e.g. Egan, about whom I’ll post soon!)? In Kite Runner, the event turned me strongly against the narrator, which might be why the author withheld it, but I suspect I didn’t like him much to being with.

Regarding The Kite Runner, I’m pretty much the only person I know who didn’t like that book, so if you’re in my camp please let me know! I found it filled with lots of clunky foreshadowing. I felt the writer could have been more subtle and the reader would have followed him; there was no need to hit us over the head with elements of the plot. We readers are smart and we can figure things out!

But back to the nobodies… I read a review in The Philadelphia Inquirer that very nicely summed up how I felt about the book, so rather than further reinvent the wheel, I hereby give you that lovely review, especially emphasizing the part where she says:

As a reader who loves Parkhurst's inventiveness, I wish she'd dumped the murder plot and just stuck with the main theme of the book: A middle-aged writer decides to rewrite the endings of all her novels and publish the alternative endings in a book called The Nobodies Album.

Read more:


http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20100704__The_Nobodies_Album___A_mystery__and_so_much_more.html