Featured Title: How Novels WorkHow Novels Work Book Mark Quiz Answers
What do the endings of John Banville's The Sea, Graham Swift's The Light of Day, and Toni Morrison's Beloved have in common?
Answer: The last words of these novels are their titles
This is perhaps the strongest way of concluding a novel with a sense of its design. An early example of a work of fiction that does this is Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, whose final sentence resonantly recalls us to the work's title. 'The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.' Here we are looking up the Thames, back into London, and seeing that we will find here, in the world's greatest commercial city, the very human 'darkness' that the novella has discovered. Banville's, Swift's and Morrison's titles are given comparable resonance by ending their novels with their titles.
Which is Ian McEwan's circadian novel?
Answer: Saturday: A circadian novel is one whose events take place within 24 hours.
This is a novelistic form that has been peculiarly popular in recent years. Other notable examples have been John Lanchester's Mr. Phillips, Graham Swift's The Light of Day and Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park. All these novels, like McEwan's, take place within a strictly circumscribed locale; this seems a requirement of the form. The local circumscription is also a property of the two great Modernist examples of the circadian novel: James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. These were not, however, the earliest such experiments. George August Sala's Twice Round the Clock, published in 1864, narrated the events taking place in a London street over the course of twenty-four hours.
What is the name of the book that Nathan Zuckerman is writing in Philip Roth's The Human Stain?
Answer: 'The Human Stain'.
There are many novels, from David Copperfield onwards, whose central characters are also novelists. Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman is not only a novelist, he is a kind of alter ego: a useful double of the author. He insistently features in Roth's novels, usually as a narrator. He is a successful novelist, he lives in New England, he is Jewish. In The Human Stain he tells us the story of his dead friend Coleman Silk, but also dramatises his hungry, novelist's interest in Coleman Silk's life. What has Coleman been doing, telling him things? "Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind." In the novel's concluding episode, Zuckerman narrates a frightening encounter with Les Farley, Silk's likely murderer, who asks to see a copy of his latest book, 'The Human Stain', when it is finished. Zuckerman remarks (to the reader) that he will have to move home before his book his published, lest he too become Farley's victim.
Who was the first novelist in English to use free indirect style throughout a novel?
Answer: Jane Austen (Free indirect style is the adoption by a third-person narrator of the sentiments that belong to a character).
Take this example. In Jane Asuten's Emma, the heroine returns to the room in which she has arranged for Harriet Smith and Mr. Elton to be alone, in the hope of a marriage proposal. The novel says, 'The lovers were standing together at one of the windows. It had a most favourable aspect'. In fact, the two are not 'lovers' at all; Mr Elton is angling for Emma herself. But the narrative insists on adopting Emma's illusions, allowing us to laugh at and sympathise with her. The whole of Emma relies on this technique, which Jane Austen uses throughout her novels. Examples of free indirect style are rare and fleeting before Austen.
Don DeLillo's Underworld and Annie Proulx Accordion Crimes are both 'novels of circulation': what are these?
Answer: stories of objects as they pass from one person to another. Underworld is the story of a baseball.
DeLillo spans a whole epoch of post-war American history by following a baseball, hit into the crowd at a famous game between the New York Dodgers and the New York Giants in 1951, via its various owners. The idea of getting a society into a novel by following an object (or sometimes an animal) through the hands of different characters is an old one. The device was popular in the eighteenth century, especially after Francis Coventry's novel Pompey the Little (1751). This anatomy of Georgian absurdities takes its title from the name of the lapdog whose fortunes Coventry describes. One of the best-selling novels of the eighteenth century was another such: Charles Johnstone's Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760-5), which follows a gold coin through the hands of the great, the vicious and the foolish. Among other eighteenth-century novels of circulation were the stories of a cat, a watch, a pincushion and a coach.
Name a Booker Prize-winning novel of the last two decades written entirely in the present tense.
Answer: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.
Narration in the present tense is rare in novels. Coetzee has done it before in Waiting for the Barbarians and The Master of Petersburg. Margaret Atwood likes to do it, in imitation of the confidential tone of her narrators (Cat's Eye, Surfacing). Jay McInnerney and Brett Easton Ellis do it to advertise the up-to-the-moment-ness of a modish style. A classic example of present tense narration is John Updike's Rabbit novels. The story of Rabbit Angstrom, Updike's anti-hero, is put in the present tense because he is a man caught in a round of habits, a man who never seems to know what is going to hit him. The present tense makes everything provisional. Recent novels using it have included John Lanchester's Mr. Phillips and Ian McEwan's Saturday. Disgrace leaves readers without any assurance that they have reached a point from where they can see the story's shape. In Coetzee's novel, the present tense makes everything temporary, except the rhythm of mere animal life.
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