Reading Time: 1 Min.
Credit…Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times Dear readers, With apologies to Stephen Hawking, anyone who’s ever experienced a root canal or a first kiss knows something about the relativity of time. Who hasn’t felt entire weeks go by like flashcards, or wondered why certain situations (a bad date, a flight delay) seem to open up wormhole portals to eternity? C’est la vie, of course, unless you are some type of time-lord wizard. But novelists are wizards, or at least magicians, and one of their favorite tricks is to fit whole narrative worlds inside a single day, book-shaped ships squeezed into bottles. The day itself doesn’t have to be noteworthy or even nominally eventful, which is often the point; think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, preparing to host her umpteenth plummy soirée, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, whose big score in the gulag is getting an extra bread crust and two bowls of gruel. But watch what a smart writer can do with the neat little nesting dolls of diversion and digression, plot and memory. The authors in this week’s newsletter take bigger swings, in that the days they build their stories around are so obviously the kind you would circle in red on a calendar. Plot machinery, though, still takes a second seat to character, observation and style. Because the best magic trick, the one that makes sleepless nights and long empty afternoons disappear, doesn’t rest on clever conceits; it just has to be a really good read. — Leah “Injury Time,” by Beryl Bainbridge Fiction, 1977 Welcome to 1970s London, where it is à la mode, apparently, to throw a dinner party to appease your tetchy mistress. Edward, a stout, fretful accountant deeply fond of his rose bushes and tobacco pipe, knows he can’t give Binny the full privileges of a wife, owing to the inconvenient fact that he already has one at home. But he can invite a client called George Simpson and his wife to Binny’s shabby, chaotic rowhouse for an evening of lamb chops and stilted conversation. It’s all going badly in an ordinary […]
Click here to view original page at 2 Novels Set Over Very Memorable Days
© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.
Reading Time: 1 Min. Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes
Reading Time: 1 Min. The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at
The shortcode is missing a valid Donation Form ID attribute.
