Before I Go to Sleep
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This is a psychological suspense novel that has gotten a lot of critical attention. It's about a woman with chronic short-term amnesia after a traumatic event that robbed her of most of her long-term memory as well.
I was really taken with the story and read the first half almost non-stop. But then it happened: I hit the moment in the book where I knew, in rough outline, what had happened, and the author denies his protagonist the same insight.
Fans of fantasy fiction often talk about the integrity of the created world, how the world of the novel has to be internally consistent. But such internal consistency is probably quite rare, if it ever happens. It's the nature of fiction to be impossible. There are degrees, though, and it's a book-by-book, reader-by-reader judgment call how much leeway you feel like giving the author.
This is particularly tricky with mystery novels that are "puzzle" novels, where the core of the novel is the working out of some situation based on clues. The writer is put between a rock and a hard place: If the reader figures out what's happened (or happening) but the protagonist hasn't, it can feel manipulative---like the character is being denied an obvious breakthrough because the author doesn't want to tip her hand. But equally dangerous is the temptation to make the mystery impossible to figure out, because then the answer feels random, like the author has picked a name out of a hat. This seems to happen when the murderer is identified because the detective remembers that, way back in chapter 3, the character said he arrived on the 4:30 train, and there is no 4:30 train on Wednesdays in August!
Lots of mystery writers avoid these traps with careful, smart plotting. But even better is to write prose that's worth reading for its own sake. Then you never feel cheated.
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This is a psychological suspense novel that has gotten a lot of critical attention. It's about a woman with chronic short-term amnesia after a traumatic event that robbed her of most of her long-term memory as well.
I was really taken with the story and read the first half almost non-stop. But then it happened: I hit the moment in the book where I knew, in rough outline, what had happened, and the author denies his protagonist the same insight.
Fans of fantasy fiction often talk about the integrity of the created world, how the world of the novel has to be internally consistent. But such internal consistency is probably quite rare, if it ever happens. It's the nature of fiction to be impossible. There are degrees, though, and it's a book-by-book, reader-by-reader judgment call how much leeway you feel like giving the author.
This is particularly tricky with mystery novels that are "puzzle" novels, where the core of the novel is the working out of some situation based on clues. The writer is put between a rock and a hard place: If the reader figures out what's happened (or happening) but the protagonist hasn't, it can feel manipulative---like the character is being denied an obvious breakthrough because the author doesn't want to tip her hand. But equally dangerous is the temptation to make the mystery impossible to figure out, because then the answer feels random, like the author has picked a name out of a hat. This seems to happen when the murderer is identified because the detective remembers that, way back in chapter 3, the character said he arrived on the 4:30 train, and there is no 4:30 train on Wednesdays in August!
Lots of mystery writers avoid these traps with careful, smart plotting. But even better is to write prose that's worth reading for its own sake. Then you never feel cheated.
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posted by Anonymous at
6:30 PM
2 Comments:
i felt like the author of we have to talk about kevin suffered for not trying to tip her hand. the narration was tortured and unnecessarily tortuous to try to save all The Good Stuff for a huge reveal at the end. what this achieved was not a major shock but a huge detraction from an intelligent story.
I know what you mean. There were only a couple of scenarios that could be played out, and so the secretiveness was out of proportion to the reveal. But in Kevin I felt like the novel had enough heft to be worth reading aside from the mystery of what exactly happened. Though it was also hampered by some unbelievable behavior by the narrator.
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