Baby Got Books

Guest Blogger: Joshua Henkin – Part 2

Author Joshua Henkin is on a virtual book tour in support of his new book, Matrimony. The book found its way onto book shelves yesterday, and he still found the time to put together a nice post for us (read yesterday’s post here).

Henkin is also the author the critically acclaimed Swimming Across the Hudson. Atlantans can check out Joshua Henkin at the MJCCA Book Festival on November 11 (right after Robby Benson!). Here’s today’s guest post:

While I’m on the subject of point of view, I wanted to say something about it in general. To me, the question of point of view is the most important decision a writer makes. It determines everything. An event seen through one set of eyes, interpreted by one person, is entirely different from the same event interpreted by another person. In an early draft of Matrimony, I wrote more omnisciently, dipping into any number of points of view, but I came to see that, focused as the novel was on the history of a marriage, it made most sense for me to write from Julian and Mia’s points of view exclusively.

Richard Russo has written a very good essay in support of a omniscience, a broad sweep, and I tend to agree with him—for certain kinds of novels, perhaps especially for the kinds of novels he generally writes. But I want to make an argument here for a more curtailed point of view (a less-is-more argument) when it comes to other kinds of novels, and certainly when it comes to short stories, most of which (unless you’re Alice Munro) do best in a single point of view because of the kind of focus a short story demands.

I’ve been thinking about this issue because my writing students, particularly my undergraduates but sometimes my MFA students as well, like to switch points of view in their short stories for no apparent reason other than that they have license to do so. But license is something different from good sense. Think about our own lives. How many times have we said to ourselves, “I wish I knew what he was thinking”? But what if we did know? What if we were telepathic? It might prove advantageous in certain circumstances, but it would also eliminate much of the mystery from life. The fact that we can’t read other people’s minds is an essential part of our existence (it allows for curiosity, a state of being that would be much less compelling if it were always being fulfilled). Why, then, if we can get by on one point of view in real life, can’t we get by on it in fiction? More to the point, the greater the number of points of view, the harder it is to keep secrets. And secrets—the gaps between what one character knows and what another character knows, and the gap between what the characters know and the reader knows—are the lifeblood of fiction.

Take Richard Bausch, who in my opinion is one of the great short story writers out there today. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m thinking of his story “Aren’t You Happy for Me?” which takes place almost exclusively on the telephone between a father and his daughter, who is about twenty. We are in the father’s point of view, and we know fairly early in the story that he has some news for his daughter: he and her mother have decided to split up. The father is planning to tell his daughter this on the phone. But before he can do so he gets preempted by her, for it turns out that she has some news as well. She’s getting married to her professor, whom the father has never heard of, much less met, and this professor is in his sixties, twenty years older than the father, and he has gotten the daughter pregnant.

Summarized in this thumbnail fashion, the story sounds potentially like bad undergraduate fiction, but you’ll have to trust me that it’s a good deal more subtle and interesting than the summary suggests. In any case, the daughter’s news is quite a lot for the father to take in, and the story goes in some surprising directions. But one thing that’s essential to the tension of the story is the fact that we’re in the father’s point of view throughout. We know what he knows, and we don’t know what he doesn’t know. Specifically, we are aware throughout the story that he has a secret that he now can’t quite get himself to tell his daughter, and we also know that the daughter has something to tell him, but she’s telling it slowly, haltingly, as the story goes along; we learn this information with the father. Try telling that story from a different point of view, or try telling it from multiple points of view, and it becomes a different piece of work entirely.

None of which is to say that I disagree with Russo’s essay. I think simply that different kinds of novels and different kinds of stories make different demands when it comes to point of view. And whatever else, a writer should never be limited by gender, race, class, you name it. You should write from whatever point of view you are impelled to write from. You better get it right, but that’s true no mater who you’re writing about. Getting it right. That’s the only thing the writer should care about.

Additional links:

The author’s web site
A trailer for Matrimony
Update: Henkin has a new essay up at Powell’s

Tags: . Matrimony, guest post, Joshua Henkin

Authors, Books | Tim | October 3, 2007 7:00 am

5 Comments

By Herman Glimscher, October 3, 2007 @ 10:06 am

I couldn’t agree more. The main problem with coming up with rules for works of art is that each work of art is a whole different set of problems. And, do we really want The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told by an omniscient narrator? If we do, we lose the power of “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
By Tim, October 3, 2007 @ 10:43 am

And, for the love of God, stay away from second person narration!
By Herman Glimscher, October 3, 2007 @ 10:52 am

You stay away from second person narration.

(Just a joke. In general, I agree wholeheartedly.)
By Tim, October 3, 2007 @ 4:02 pm

A short story about a female trapeze artist told in the second person may have soured me on that narrative voice for ever, “as you grab the bar, your breasts heave…” – um, no they don’t.

The Sock Man Story in the AJC was pretty good though.