I read this book a month ago, but it’s stuck in my mind this whole time, and I needed to process some of what Smiley does in this book in terms of reader involvement. To start: I came across this book years ago (and have carried it with me through several moves) at the recommendation of a writer friend whose opinion on Books I Should Read has never been wrong. True to form, after years of “meaning to read it,” I finally brought this one up to my bedside table and committed to getting through it, and I’m SO GLAD I did. This may be one of the most gut-wrenching books I’ve read recently, despite being a meandering, quiet, generational saga. In no way do I mean this as a criticism when I say it: this book’s pace feels like a strong, stout man trudging through the wilderness, setting bird traps, and breathing the free air deeply into his lungs. It moves, steadily, but not faster than necessary. It allows you to sink into the world, sink into the era, when time moved slower and the seasons ordered every aspect of life. The characters are as fascinating as they are mysterious and reserved, but that only makes the emotion stick out all the more.
Smiley doesn’t do all the things we’re told to do, or if she does, she does it in a way that feels totally divorced from TV/movie immediacy. It’s omniscient (don’t get me started on how omniscient is the true written-story format as it’s one of the few things TV/movies CAN’T do well and how it allows a much bigger overview and examination of the world we live in and all the foibles and misunderstandings among us awkward humans–BUT THAT’S FOR ANOTHER TIME), and the thing that startled me most was how deliberately Smiley pulls away right at the peak of a breaking emotional wave. She doesn’t describe characters screaming, crying, tearing at their hair. She describes everything UP TO THE MOMENT when that would happen, and then she skips ahead, dancing lightly over the details of the reaction. The details, meanwhile, BREAK YOUR SOUL. The reader is then left to process ALL the emotion that built up to that breaking point, knowing full well how those characters must be feeling, and Smiley leaves it with the reader, forcing them to handle it themselves, giving them just enough overview of the reaction to really drive home how devastating the crash was. It’s absolutely brutal. You don’t get the safety of watching the characters work through things. The emotion is handed off like hot coals into the reader’s palms, and you have to handle the searing, burning agony.
It’s hard to describe specifics without betraying too much information about the plot, but take this for an example: Smiley spends three whole pages describing the hunger that strikes a certain character with a newborn one winter, describes how the woman tries to find enough food, describes the child begging to be nursed constantly, how thin he’s getting, how they’re all losing the energy to get up everyday, how the animals are dying, and then just two sentences on the moment when the beloved child dies. It’s SO PAINFUL. You feel the character’s loss, her brutal aching for her child, the horrific slap that a whale washes up shortly thereafter providing major relief sustenance, that if only the child had lived a little longer, he might have survived–NONE of this is spelled out, by the way. Smiley tells it all in a very matter-of-fact voice, hand-feeding the reader NOTHING in terms of connection to the emotional breaking point, and continues on, leaving the reader almost in tears, thinking of all the ways things could have turned out differently. It’s BEAUTIFUL AGONY.
I think this really drove home for me what I believe I read in Stephen King’s On Writing years and years and years ago, that if you want to make a reader cry, don’t let the character cry. Force the reader to experience the pain, the horror, and deny them the easier experience of watching the character process the emotion. It feels very different from what modern fiction tends to do, but maybe I’m just reading the wrong things. Still, this is one of the things I admire most about classic literature: this ability to pull back at the emotional break and make the reader cope with it. It’s like being a child, alone in your bed, terrified of the shadows, and having no one nearby to hold your hand. You have to cope. It’s the most effective method I’ve seen of really dragging the emotion out of the reader. And Smiley does this not once, but MULTIPLE TIMES, so that by the end of the book, your head is still spinning with all this sorrow that hasn’t been dealt with deliberately on the page. It lingers. It burns in your heart. I. LOVED. IT.
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In completely unrelated news, I have something exciting happening with “Catching College” soon, but I can’t talk about it yet. Keep an eye here for when I can announce it!