Book Writing World members recently discussed Booker Prize-winner The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst. While most everyone agreed that Hollinghurst writes brilliant descriptions, there was considerable disagreement about whether anything happens, or if the book even has a plot. Most of the group of seven stopped reading halfway through or earlier because they lost interest in the novel.
Building on E.M. Forster’s explanation that causation distinguishes plot from story, Joan Silber writes, “We read anything looking for a pattern of events, and through it a meaning–the reason someone is bothering to tell us this. Plot is how a writer indicates the ways she or he thinks the world works.” The Line of Beauty has a plot, but the protagonist’s story is as much or more about why he is an outsider in that particular world as it is about what happens to him while he’s there. Such indirection can be the point of a story to suggest how its world works, but some readers feel like they’re being taken the long way around the block to get next door.
This kind of frustration fascinates me. Once I commit to reading a book, I’m a patient reader. I like action if it’s deeply character-driven, but I’m as interested in internal action–thoughts, memories, fantasies. But what convinces me to commit to reading a book? It depends. Plot certainly seems to be a matter of taste, and even my own varies, which is not to suggest that anything goes. But for a writer going to the trouble of writing a publishable novel, I think it’s difficult NOT to achieve at least a thin plot. However, it’s entirely possible to do it NOT well. And for some readers the most brilliantly devised thin plot just isn’t going to be enough.
So how do we judge whether a story’s plot is technically sound? Is it fair to argue that maybe some readers just don’t care about certain plots, or is that a copout of weak-kneed relativism, a denial of structural problems?
Forster says a novel “can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next.” The only possible fault, he says, is failing to make that happen. But I can think of many best-selling novels that have attracted readers (the Twilight series, the DaVinci Code series) but whose merit has been questioned by critics and and even the readers who love them. A common complaint about page-turners is that the plots are not very believable because characters are poorly developed.
Characters are crucial. Although Aristotle believed plot to be more important than character, most of the modern writers whose advice I’ve read believe that characters and plots depend on one another. Elizabeth Bowen explains, “Everything that happens happens either to or because of one of the characters.” Edith Wharton says that characters must seem alive and bring a novel to life. It would seem that the humanity of characters is what should make plot interesting to readers. Events don’t merely happen. Rather, events occur to characters who must deal with the events’ consequences, and readers can relate to that, yes? But what if plot makes sense for a character, but a reader doesn’t like the character or dismisses a character’s trajectory because the progress is, for that reader, too slow?
While I would love to answer all of the questions I’ve asked, I don’t believe there is a definitive way to determine whether a plot or character is compelling. I’m comfortable with deciding on a case-by-case basis, but not with taking a we’ll-know-it-when-we-see-it approach. To be honest, I’m working through these issues as I work on revising my novel. The best I can do at the moment is leave the questions unanswered and keep pondering. More to come.
James Black is a founding member of Book Writing World. He earned a masters degree in English literature at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been published in the anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television and in the journal Anon. He’s writing his first novel about the family of a closeted, gay soldier stationed in Iraq. Check out his blog, Quota. He contributes to the BWW weekly!
James, Thank you for beginning this conversation here, and for bringing The Line of Beauty to the Book Writing World. I wasn’t sure there was much of a plot–no, I think it was the jump, away from Leo and to Wani, that started me and made me worry that there wasn’t a plot. I felt a bit wary about investing in the Wani plot. Was he just the next boyfriend? Might be jump again and again? The last third of the book or so is, I would argue, plot-driven (not as distinguished from character-driven) in a way that hooked me in on that level (much as I was hooked in by the brilliant evocation of worlds, seemingly disparate worlds, converging or co-existing, in the first section. But the energy of that plot made me wonder if, in fact, the book “really started” later–say with the relationship with Wani, the discovery about Gerald’s secret, etc. However, once I finished reading and all the strands came together intricately, I saw how necessary those early sections were to the plot. It wasn’t clear to me–and therefore didn’t pull me through–until after I’d finished. It may well be that I am too vested in plot, but it’s notable that in fact Hollinghurst had a plot, a plot with lots at stake and lots of complications, with a big crisis (and yes, a critique of that crisis–the revelation that wasn’t a revelation being handled as the most shocking by most of the characters). Therefore, this certainly isn’t a book that argues against plot. But neither does it dangle plot before us, encouraging some bit of flash to catch our eye and peruse it further. (I’m reaching for a cruising metaphor here . . .)
These are some of my thoughts and I hope we can continue the conversation.
Note: among other typos above, peruse = pursue. Pursue it further. All I mean to say is that Hollinghurst didn’t use plot to hook readers, in my opinion, but in the end, every piece of the book mattered, plot-wise, was justified on that level.
Gosh, Elizabeth, I’m excited. Every little bit counts, huh? I’ve been thinking Hollinghurst is setting us up for some big thing. I was thinking today that the implication of starting the book this way is that all these relationships matter and that we’ll find out how when the web starts falling apart. Also, I was thinking that In the first part of the book, it’s all set-up because that’s where Nick is: it’s all so new, he’s feeling his way through it all, trying to come to some safe, sure place and even though there are some descriptions that really get into Nick’s voice so completely that there are no other breaths in it, there is really nothing in the book that is not from Nick’s eyes, even if they’re the eyes in the back of the head trying for a 360 degree view. Once the Wani thing began, Nick had already been around the block a bit and he sounds like it, and I like to think that’s what Hollinghurst was going for.