#5 Novel openings, or how to begin, or “You have 10 percent”
By which I mean openings to novels, or novel openings, or oh scratch that can I start again? With readings from 6-ish books by Lodge, Smiley, Heller, Tesich...
In true rebellious spirit, my fifth piece is all about beginnings. I’d hoped to ramp up the irony further by publishing it at the end of 2023, but ran out of time, so here we are at the annoyingly apt beginning of 2024.
First though, a piece of mine appears in edition 15 of New Escapologist, a quirky work-shy magazine which I’ve admired for a long time and which gave me a chance to revisit and review the 1950s novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Then among my standard rejections, last month I received a heart-warming personalised rejection from the editor of Cyphers: “I thought it well written and interesting; I found the dinner party conversations a bit stiff.” In hindsight, she’s right about that dinner party stuff.
Anyway, now, four paragraphs in, it’s time to begin.
Novel openings
Each novel contains two openings—the first on page one, the second which happens, well, um, a little later on.
That first opening is easily grasped. It’s each novel’s “Call me Ishmael” or “It is a truth universally acknowledged”. It’s the arrival of that distinctive voice, that gripping intro which hooks the reader. Even in novels which don’t have Melville and Austen’s iconic status, you can guarantee the first page has been obsessively pored over, rewritten perhaps twenty, thirty times. They tend to do an outstanding job of laying the foundations for every other page that follows (though I can think of one notable exception1).
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka is a neat example of introducing intrigue, voice and plot all within five paragraphs on the first page. It opens:
You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse.
We’re then told the narrator is, in fact, deceased, and page one closes with:
And now you know what other do not. You have answer to the following questions. Is there life after death? What’s it like?
This inverted question-and-answer is satisfying and quirky. And it’s also relevant and plies us with key information. In thinking about this post, I’ve picked up and reread the first page of a lot of novels—and would recommend. Try it.
The second opening
The other opening, the one which happens at some point after page one, is far trickier. In David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction—a book of what I find to be quite flimsy literary criticism—we’re asked:
When does the beginning of a novel end, is another difficult question to answer. Is it the first paragraph, the first few pages, or the first chapter? However one defines it, the beginning of a novel is a threshold, separating the real world we inhabit from the world the novelist has imagined.
Hmm, okay, but this from Jane Smiley in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel is far more helpful:
You, as the author, have about 10 percent of your novel to show the reader who, what, where, and when. Don’t hesitate to take out every novel on your shelves, good or bad, and look at their expositions.
That 10 percent rule is interesting. It’s useful for writers, if only for an anchor we can pull against or drop altogether. Intuitively, it does feel true to me that I’d give a 1,000-page book a longer probationary period than a 110-page book like Small Things Like These. It’s a physiological message that the hands holding the object send to the brain: ‘I’ve turned fifty pages already and you’re still not enjoying it yet, are you?’ (Perhaps this is another reason why ebooks simply don’t work.)
Smiley gives an example from David Lodge’s How Far Can You Go? which I haven’t read and can’t vouch for:
Lodge’s exposition runs exactly a chapter, 10 percent of the pages of the novel. It is a textbook exposition—gathering all the characters in one place, at Mass, in the presence of their antagonist, naming each, describing what each is thinking […] At the end of Chapter 1, the author has set out all of the terms of his side of the bargain.
She also cites Francine Prose’s Three Pigs in Five Days (haven’t read, can’t vouch) in which “at exactly the 10 percent mark, Nina realizes that the proprietress of the hotel is one of her lover’s former mistresses.”
So, if the page-one opening sets the tone and the setting, this second opening is when the plot kicks in through the ‘inciting incident’. Perhaps more accurately, this 10 percent tide marks the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the middle. The point at which early promises must progress and be fulfilled.
Challenge accepted
Smiley tells us to take out our novels and look at their expositions. Let’s try it, and let’s make it hard.
I head to my bookshelf and reacquaint myself with the type of fiction I courted in my twenties: the rambling mid-century male American literary fiction in which nothing really seems to happen.
I open Something Happened by Joseph Heller (569 pages) in which, as far as I recall, nothing happens until right at the end of the novel—hence the title which alludes to the insane mundanity and mundane insanity of 1950s post-war suburban life. (For more on that, see Kurt Vonnegut’s review of the book.) I reread the opening passage which primarily follows Bob Slocum around his office, laden with anxiety, aroused by secretaries, and affronted by his colleagues.
Surprisingly: something happens. Here at page 67, or 11.8 percent of the total text, we reach the end of chapter two (called ‘The office in which I work’) and are treated to the following:
I close the door to my office after Kagle leaves, sealing myself inside and shutting everybody else out, and try to decide what to do about my conversation with Arthur Baron.
And I find I am being groomed for a better job.
And I find—God help me—that I want it.
This is a surprise. In an office-based narrative, a promotion is about as eventful as it gets (beyond being fired, of course). Here, within the first passage of Bob’s dealings in office politics, we have something happening. I suspect Heller’s novel gives the impression of unstructuredness and digressiveness but is secretly, carefully structured after all. (Smiley 1 : Aldridge 0)
Off-balance but undeterred, I pick up Karoo by Steve Tesich (406 pages). Saul Karoo is a divorced, alcoholic screenwriter and his mind swells with the day-to-day concerns of getting health insurance, avoiding his grown-up son and going out for another long lunch. Again, here, at page 56, or 13.8 percent, something curious happens. Karoo takes an inventory of his upcoming appointments:
The plastic bag of dry cleaning slung over my shoulder gave me the appearance of some vital businessman on the go.
In keeping with the image, I gave myself over to the calendar in my head of appointments and upcoming events.
There was my Tuesday appointment with Dr. Kolodny at eleven fifteen A.M.
According to Jerry, I would be fully insured with GenMed by the end of the week.
Give Billy a call at Harvard. Tell him the happy news.
Lunch with Guido on Friday.
Another divorce dinner with Dianah. When?
Jay Cromwell was coming to town and according to that Bobbie woman he wanted to see me. February twenty-second and twenty-third.
It wasn’t like me to remember dates, but these I remembered.
Cromwell’s arrival loomed as the most anxiety-provoking feature on the landscape of my mental calendar.
This is pretty dry stuff as far as Karoo goes, and achieves nothing apart from reminding the reader of the various plot-lines which are in motion (if they can be called plot-lines at all). This is ‘signposting’. But in a novel comprised of the uneventful items of daily life, this is an appropriate way of signalling that the inciting incident is over and the text is gearing up to some rising action. (Smiley 2 : Aldridge 0)
I’ve come away liking the 10 percent rule. It’s a useful guide for editing your own work, and applying it to my bookshelf has shown me the mechanics at work in even a divertive, seemingly unstructured novel.
Weird postscript
The weirdest thing is this: remember that brief intro at the top of this post, about my article and my rejection? It took up exactly 10 percent of the post which follows.
Incidentally, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a novel where page one arrives with such promise, only to be totally let down by pages 2-259. It opens:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. …
I found this meta-textual opening so striking that I remember where I was when I first read this (it was in a Chiquito’s near Tottenham Court Road, sometime in 2014, after I’d been in London for work). Shame about the rest of the book, which just wasn’t for me.