Three years ago I sat around a conference table with half a dozen other writers and a literary agent who asked us, when we introduced ourselves, to speak about narrative voice. She said she’d been thinking about it a lot recently and wanted to pick our brains.
This meeting occurred in the final third of a ten day writers’ conference. On the first day, a faculty writer delivered a lecture on lyric poetry arguing that verse always aspires, and fails, to mimic song. The poetic voice wishes it could sing; it wants to deliver all the pleasure and immediacy of music. I write fiction rather than poetry, and filtered this lecture through that lens. I decided if lyric poetry mimics song, then narrative fiction tries to simulate the pleasures — and avoid the inconveniences — of spending time with another person.
That’s what I told the group around the conference table. A strong voice in fiction offers someone who can share experience with you. It’s a type of intimacy. Sometimes, even, a type of seduction.
I’m beginning with thoughts about voice because I’m trying to answer a question I asked myself as I read A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G Summers. The novel is delivered via first-person narration, fashioned as the protagonist’s memoir written during her life sentence in prison. That’s not much of a spoiler, by the way — the narrator tells us in the first chapter:
If you followed the trial, and I assume if you’re reading this that you paid attention to my trial, then you already know how and where I killed Casimir — or you think you know. [...] None got it right. You know only enough about me to be sufficiently interested to shell out money to hear me tell my story, or, if you’re cheap, to snag a copy from your public library. You may think you know, but believe me, you don’t.
My note to myself in the margin: Why does this voice put me off?
I think of myself as a generous reader. I don’t like to dislike what I’m reading; sometimes I even struggle to admit to myself when I do. I couldn’t deny, though, that as I read A Certain Hunger there was something about the protagonist and her posture toward the world that made me want to turn away. She’s an anti-heroine not designed to be “likeable,” but she didn’t even stir a sense of fascination in me, only distaste and, eventually, fatigue.
I came to realize A Certain Hunger reminded me of The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai, which I listened to via audiobook last summer. They’re both told in the first person, each by a woman who has something — a whole series of deeds — to confess to the reader. And in that confession, each woman tries to bring a sense of cause and effect to those events, to identify her own motives and psychology.
Another reason the resemblance struck me: I really did not like The Borrower either. Near the end, I changed the playback settings and listened to the denouement at 1.3x speed while washing a sinkful of dishes. To be fair to Makkai, I think it was the audiobook reader’s performance style that put me off. I felt frustrated by how the reader put emphatic stress on every.single.sentence. in what felt like an effort to raise every moment to a level of desperate, heightened emotion.
But in a work as long as a novel, you need peaks and troughs. Not every sentence is that urgent, and by pretending they are, you steal from the sentences that deserve that emotion. It feels pushy, I told a friend. Like the reader’s trying to sell me something — which, of course, she was. But if I was going to buy it, I wanted to feel won over by the story’s own merits, not the reader’s plaintive tone imploring me to yield my sympathies right now. I wanted the narrative process to unfold on its own.
Dorothy, A Certain Hunger’s narrator, doesn’t beg for our understanding in that same way, but the explanations of her homicidal motives and the history lessons on female psychopaths she diligently lays out make a case of their own.
The confessional voice is by nature insistent and desperate. These can be good elements in fiction; they can create intrigue and tension. But I wonder if there’s something in the insistence for my attention — something needy and too hastily intimate — that makes me instinctually lean backward.
I’ve certainly felt this way in conversations with real people that took sudden confessional turns. Once while waiting for the restroom in a Chicago restaurant, the man waiting beside me first asked if I was having a nice holiday season — it was December — before pivoting to his own recent divorce. Again, in a laundromat in Iowa, a man spoke to me for forty-five minutes about his recently deceased wife as I waited for my clothes to finish. These interactions and others like them make me wonder what sort of energy I put out into the world. Whether I really seem that eager a confidant.
In the case of A Certain Hunger, I felt as though Dorothy flattered herself with the reader’s assumed interest in her; it felt too early and unearned. Like these strangers, it appeared as though she cared little about who she spoke to so long as she could speak at all.
The novel’s climax circles this theme of confession. The police visit Dorothy to question her about one of her murders. It appears she’s let a mistake slip through, though she can’t fathom how. To distract herself, Dorothy visits her only friend: Emma, an agoraphobic painter she’s known since college. Drunk, Dorothy wants to confess:
I wanted, I absolutely itched, to tell Emma about this murder. Lying next to Emma in her big rumpled bed, I wanted to disclose the whole of it [...] I felt my hand cover my mouth, an involuntary act to stanch my story’s flow.
The next day, hungover and paranoid, Dorothy can’t remember whether she followed this impulse or not. She finds herself in limbo between the purged relief of confession and the quiet veil of secrecy. Her suspicion toward Emma overwhelms her, and that, more than the police investigation, is what leads to her arrest.
Dorothy insists this impulse to confess wasn’t born out of guilt. “I searched the parts of my body where guilt was supposed to live and I found nothing,” she says. “Nothing but the naked and pulsating will to tell.”
I’d wager her desire for confession isn’t so different from what makes her write her memoir in prison. It shares heritage with what compelled those strangers to speak with me, too. And with the essence of the creative impulse. It’s a craving for self-expression. To feel seen. A release that requires something very foreign to a psychopath like Dorothy: willful vulnerability in the presence of another.
She’s written her memoir, but she delivers it behind a shield made up of equal parts sex, gourmet food, and violence. I shied away from her because she kept herself removed from me, and because her allergy to sincere connection became exhausting. Confessions can’t be self-conscious; they can’t be stylized or half-hearted. They’re not performances. They are, by necessity, earnest and unhesitating. It’s an act of vulnerability. Any effort to control the outcome and bend perception to your advantage defeats the purpose.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post, please consider liking, commenting, or sharing with a friend.
This entry covered my first category: recent release. You’ll hear from me again in two weeks when I’ll be writing about The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar as the choice for my second category: diversity.
Take care.
What a lovely, considered, and thoughtful review! (Please start contacting the NYT Book Review now!) Voice IS critical. If the protagonist is utterly unlikable, or has a voice that grates on your soul, the remaining aspects of the novel must be outstanding to overcome the reader's discomfort. I, for one, find that rarely does a novel compensate for spending time with someone I abhor. That's why (in the beforetimes, when actually allowed to browse the stacks) I flip open to a random page. If the writing is compelling, the book is a keeper. If my nose wrinkles, I flip to a second page (second chances are a good thing!) and try again. If the voice, or general writing, remains off-putting, then the novel is a no-go for me. Looking forward to your next review!