Innovative novelists throw aside traditions

The most popular literary event in California has finally ended.All across campus, the classic white tents from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books have been packed away, and attendees at last weekend’s event have traded crowded Trousdale book stands for routine stop-and-go L.A. traffic. As they finish shelving their literary spoils and return to the normality of their daily lives, the Festival of Books becomes a distant memory, something to reflect on fondly as they wait for news of next year’s event.

Attendees haven’t, however, forgotten the insights and advice their favorite authors had to offer, especially if that author challenged everything they knew about literature.

Sunday’s panel with best-selling author Jamaica Kincaid was one such earth-shattering event. As Kincaid discussed her most recent work, See Now Then, traditional expectations of literature were thrown aside. The most innovative novels, it seems, are those that break with literary norms, forging their own voices as creative interpretations of the written word.

See Now Then follows the disintegration of a marriage between Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, two inhabitants of a domestic New England world. In her novel, Kincaid plays with notions of time and perspective, ultimately recreating reality as the reader knows it. And with her history of playing with prose-poetry and nonfiction, Kincaid is probably one of today’s most flexible authors, fully equipped to handle a novel of epic literary proportions.

Still, See Now Then has met strong condemnation from the critical community. Aside from its unwarranted frustration with the “autobiographical” context of the novel — some reviewers have drawn parallels between the end of Mr. and Mrs. Sweets’ marriage and the end of Kincaid’s marriage to her former husband, Allen Shawn — many critics have complained about the overt style of the novel. In the words of The New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner, in an article titled “The Marriage Has Ended; Revenge Begins,” Kincaid’s See Now Then is a “bipolar novel [that is] half séance, half ambush.”

“See Now Then has run-on sentences, few paragraph breaks, no real plot and little in the way of dialogue,” Garner wrote. “In a recent interview Ms. Kincaid maintained that her book’s primary subject was time itself. This is painful to absorb, because See Now Then becomes self-consciously clotted and grandiose whenever the subject of time heaves into view. You will have to back up and reread many of the sentences here just to be certain that she isn’t, in some regard, attempting satire.”

When he’s not chastising Kincaid for using her husband as source material or writing a novel that “frequently peels away into baroque fantasy,” Garner complains about Kincaid’s unique approach to See Now Then. For Kincaid, such attitudes are hardly new but frustrating nonetheless.

As an author whose first work, Girl, has bounced between the poetry and prose genres, Kincaid is used to having her work defy categories. Still, she told panel attendees on Sunday that See Now Then, which features elaborate poetic language, has been critically dismissed as a novel. Instead, some reviewers have considered it a masked autobiography. Kincaid said on Sunday, however: “Please allow me to assert with confidence that I’ve written a novel.”

“It’s not a book in the usual way of and then and then and next. It doesn’t have what you’d call a traditional structure or a traditional narrative. But it’s very structured, it’s very mannered, actually, in the way your mind might work,” Kincaid told NPR. “I mean, I’ve come to think that the traditional way of writing is the artificial way that that’s not the way things work at all. It’s not the way thinking works.”

And she’s absolutely right. Why, when we pick up novels, do we expect conventional modes of storytelling, all of which involve a strict linear structure with a beginning, middle and end? Do we expect novels to maintain an almost mathematical structure?

The answer, plain and simple, is “of course not.” When we look at works that have earned our attention, the most successful pieces of literature have played with literary conventions, capturing our hearts as they bring something new to the blank page.

Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, has long dabbled with traditional literary methods of time and space. Beloved employs a stream-of-consciousness style that offers much to the reader who’s willing to look a little deeper into the material. Likewise, Jazz plays with an unusual narrator, and Love has a very specific nonlinear style. None of these innovative methods cost Morrison when it was time for her to collect the Pulitzer Prize or the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But dismissals of conventional style are common among other authors we revere most. Virginia Woolf dismissed Western literary traditions as early as 1925 with the publication of Mrs. Dalloway. Isabel Allende, whose most recent novel Maya’s Notebook hit shelves Tuesday, merged food recipes, paintings and prose in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Sense. e.e. cummings broke the poetry norms when he published poems written completely in lowercase and used a deliberate syntax that mimicked the rhythm of his subject matter.

It’s important to remember then that the art of telling a good story is not bound by any particular rules or norms. Being human is a messy endeavor and relying on neat storytelling conventions destroys the beauty of that experience.

Perhaps Kincaid said it best in the final moments of Sunday’s panel: “To be human … to exist. … It’s a disaster.”

And unconventional literature, it seems, is the best way to capture that.

Carrie Ruth Moore is a sophomore majoring in English. Her column “Cover to Cover” runs Thursdays.