Fiction and Time (1)

John Wilson on how writers manage "serial revelations"

A still from NEA’s 1977 documentary The Writer in America: Ross Macdonald.

I’m hoping to do an occasional series on this theme (hence the parenthetical number), a subject of endless fascination. One of my favorite essays by one of my favorite writers on another one of my favorite writers appears in a book called Inward Journey: Reflections on Ross Macdonald by 25 of America’s Most Distinguished Authors, edited by Ralph B. Sipper. First published by a small press, Cordelia Editions, in 1984, it was issued as a trade paperback by The Mysterious Press in 1987. As you might infer from the title, the book is uneven, but it includes many fine pieces, above all a tiny gem of an essay (just four pages) by Hugh Kenner, titled “Learning.”

Kenner and Macdonald became friends in 1950, early in Kenner’s long run at the University of California in Santa Barbara. “We had two things in common,” Kenner recalls (along with much they didn’t share): “Canadian roots, and, yes, a formal interest in writing. . . . Somehow our shaky acquaintance prospered. . . . Within months I was bringing him my 20-page drafts that floundered into qualification, to learn the next day how I might restitch them into something that moved; that moreover left the reader clear about what he’d moved through.”

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Wow. I was fascinated. And then I came to the part that practically caused me to levitate, Kenner explaining how Macdonald taught him to think in terms of “blocks, several pages in length. . . The order of blocks was like the sequencing of events in a narrative. . . . I’d not even known that it was narrative I was attempting. Exposition, I had been taught, was one thing, but narrative something else. Ken was quietly persuasive. All was narrative. When hard to follow, it was bad narrative. Narrative meant no more than serial revelations in time.”

I do not exaggerate, dear reader, when I say that even now, almost forty years after I first read this passage, I can recall (as if it were yesterday) the delight I felt, the sense of having learned a great truth, at once simple and profound.

So: One way to think about fiction is to regard it from this angle. How does this particular writer, in this particular novel, choose to manage those “serial revelations in time”? Are there, at any given moment (in the 2020s, for instance), dominant conventions for doing so, which we as readers may not be consciously aware of until they are drawn to our attention, or until we begin to look for them ourselves?

You could take up these questions with whatever fiction you happen to be reading (they’re particularly useful when you are reading a number of books by the same writer, seeking to grasp his or her particular inscape). One good place to start would be Ross Macdonald’s own novels featuring private detective Lew Archer. There are 18 of them, starting with The Moving Target (1949) and concluding with The Blue Hammer (1976). Periodically I read through the lot, always in order of publication; I’ve never been bored.

What you’ll notice, if you read them on the lookout for “serial revelations in time,” is a distinctive pattern. Each book centers on a particular case, the unfolding of which takes place in a highly compressed span. Then there is the “middle distance,” where we get background for the immediate crisis. Finally (and this is a Macdonald trademark), almost every case will turn out to reach way back in time. In the fast-paced course of any given novel, the reader will be sharing Archer’s immersion in these three “layers” of time.

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What gets the most attention from people writing about Macdonald’s work is the third layer, admired by many critics but scorned by some as too predictable. Yet part of what makes the Archer novels so rich is the interplay among all three layers.

But whatever fiction you are reading now, whether “old stuff” or the new releases the New York Times is telling you to read this week (mostly, alas, not my cup of tea; they predictably skipped the just-out Peter Handke book, featuring two superb novellas), you will find this rubric illuminating. For instance, there’s a vogue for a mash-up of historical fiction, horror (horror is very big right now, bleeding into all fictional genres), and the comically predictable wokeism (not intended to be funny, of course; au contraire) that infects every sphere of our culture today. You might find it illuminating to focus on the “serial revelations in time” that dominate these books. And if you do undertake such researches, whether in this sector or in any other rooms in the House of Fiction, I hope you will let me know.